This seems like both a feature and a bug with the fediverse. Some topics just fit a lot of subs and then you multiply that by all the Lemmy instances. It seems like the discussions around big topics can really get spread around.

When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.

There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.

If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.

It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.

The most effective method of protesting would be to find a way to get the masses to turn against the lawmakers in such a way that they convince the lawmakers to solve the problem that the protest is focused against.

But most of these protests just piss off the masses. They run their day with traffic, they destroy heritage sites that people care about, and while they do get in the news and get some publicity, people’s memory is quite negative. And there are zero focus on anybody who could actually change the situation.

There’s a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.

Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.

I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.

So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.

Funny games. The US probably has spies on the Russian ships. Russia may have a spy or two on the US sub. Neither side is remotely surprised by any of the public information on this.

The US sends Cuba a check to rent Guantanamo bay. Cuba doesn’t cash it.

I kinda suspect Cuba would prefer to evict the tenant but in this situation the one with the nuclear powered subs gets to set the terms.

If the pharmacy companies and insurers weren’t sleeping together then the insurers might be doing some kind of collective bargaining. But nope.

This Wired article is an interesting read, well worth the time.

I wish we could see into the head of Stockton Rush a little bit more. The job of all entrepreneurs is to a large degree knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, as well as figuring out which rules you can break. Usually the lives of passengers and yourself is not on the line, though and that’s why so many of the highly competent engineers left his team.

A lot of his decision making seemed money driven. He got quotations for testing services but declined because of the cost. Salvaging the old titanium rings from the old busted hull to use on the new hull was a risky choice but new ones were surely very expensive. Perhaps a much larger budget would have led to a more committed team of experts and the resources to test things to a higher degree of confidence.

As this article points out, OceanGate just never came up with a design that was good enough for the job at hand.

But what can you say. The ocean floor is littered with countless dreams.

Of all the billionaires who do exist Bill and Melinda would probably agree with you. Bill has been pretty clear that he always played the game to win but he’s also stated he intends to give it all away and he’s openly recruiting other billionaires to give it all away as well.

I suppose evil billionaires could give it away to make the world a worse plCe, say by developing something like sharks with lasers on their heads, But again in these guys case they’re giving it away to help eliminate malaria around the world.

If all billionaires were like Bill and the Melinda I suppose the world would be a significantly better place.

It sounds obvious on the surface but higher wages don’t always equal happier staff or more output.

I don’t think the staff making 500k at OpenAI will be measurably happier with another 100k, for example.

But there is definitely a lot to be gained by getting staff as far away from a sense of poverty as possible and ikea might have helped their line workers a lot with this change.

These old stodgy dudes have two things going for them that young guys don’t (yet) have - a lifetime of building a support network of donors and mastery at playing “the game”.

They should retire at 60 and pass along their donors and skills to a few proteges, but recently they cling until the very last breath.

There must be bots trolling GitHub for API keys, crypto secret keys, and other such valuable data

A long time ago (like pre 2000) most regions in the US had public broadcast stations where anyone could submit and air their videos, uncensored. I think typically for free or maybe there was some nominal charge. Usually it started at 10:00 p.m. or midnight when they’d start playing weird stuff like this. Sometimes it was porn, sometimes nasty gory stuff, but I think a lot of times just people who wanted to go on and complain about something.

Weird times

The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It’s why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.

Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.

I’m not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn’t pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?

We need somebody to wear a 360 camera and go walk every aisle every day. Use image recognition to get the SKU and price from the labels + estimate stock level. Upload the data to an API that’s accessible to all for like $5/month.

Kind of like the Streetview cameras but for spying on actual in store prices.

I think the rules are typically negotiable in advance, especially when it’s down to just 2 contenders.

Debates have the potential to show more than eloquence or intelligence, they also show soft skills like whether the candidate can control the conversation, control under pressure, how easily they succumb when bullied, and give the audience an opportunity to read their body language, which may develop (or remove) trust.

Biden famously told Trump in a debate: “would you shut up, man?” And in that moment quite a few Americans were swayed to select him believing he’s not susceptible to getting run over by trump mouth diarrhea attack like so many other politicians are.

Impressive, I don’t think I’d heard of Ceefax. It seems like it was broadcast and then recorded, and then this set top box knew how to interpret and parse the data into this format.

I guess the target audience is Russian citizens and military personnel?

I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.

That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.

A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.

Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.

All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.

The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.

As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.

The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.

Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.

I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.

In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.

My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.

Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.