Skip Navigation
Grindr loses nearly half its staff to strict return-to-work rule
  • This is the plan, but it's always a bad one. The people hopping jobs are the top performers, ones with marketable resumes that get snapped up even in a weak market. The ones forced to remain either feel less marketable or are less marketable for a number of reasons.

    It's extreme short term thinking that leads to both morale and performance issues sooner than leadership expects.

  • Grindr loses nearly half its staff to strict return-to-work rule
  • Being in the same location at the same time certainly seems like it'd make organizing and meeting with union reps easier. And with more motivation to do so due to crappier working conditions. I'd say it's more likely the remainder will unionize, yeah. And then have the union push for WFH.

  • Burning ship off Dutch coast has more e-cars than thought
  • Both li-ion and lithium polymer batteries still have many kilograms of lithium. A lithium-ion battery pack for a single electric car contains about 8 kilograms (kg) of lithium, according to figures from US Department of Energy science and engineering research centre Argonne National Laboratory. It may be a small percentage of the total battery pack and coolant weight, but it's still a lot of extremely explosive metal.

  • Burning ship off Dutch coast has more e-cars than thought
  • Fun fact: most gasoline car fires are started by electrical issues. Mechanical fuel pumps died out with the carburetor, just about every car made has hot wires going to the gas tank. The conflagration is completely fueled by gasoline though. Diesel is pretty hard to ignite, you can toss a burning match into a pool of diesel and the match will go out. But once ignited it'll burn like a champ.

  • Kbin's "Log in" bug is discouraging me from participating
  • What's worse is the login page re-directs to a home page, wiping out the comment I was making and navigating away from the thread I was browsing. I could deal with it if it expired my logins once a week or so (although reddit kept me logged in so long as I kept interacting daily), but multiple times a day is infuriating.

  • Talk me out of using countertop induction cooktops (with outlets for both higher powered commercial and lower powered household devices) as my burners vs having a built-in cooktop.
  • Thermodynamics question: do you think it is more or less efficient to burn coal or natural gas, use that heat to boil water to turn a turbine, generate enough of a surplus to avoid brownouts and blackouts, transmit that power over long distance, radiating energy the entire way and losing more at every transformer power station eventually using energy to boil a pot of water...

    Or to burn gas to boil a pot of water directly.

    I own stock of energy producers and transporters in my 401k, so I'm extremely glad those in power get this question wrong. But I also know that wrongness has a cost.

    And before you say "solar" please realize capacity does not equal production. Germany is on the forefront of renewable energy, and generates 10.4% of power from solar compared to 20.1% from lignite, the dirtiest possible coal. Hard coal, natural gas and lignite add up to 11.3 + 13.3 + 20.1 = 44.6%. United states has solar at 3.93% of our energy mix, with 37.82% generated from natural gas.

  • Convert to atheism
  • Atheism is no more a religion than a lack of a Ferrari is a Ferrari. That's the best way I know of to explain the concept.

  • News: A confused Dianne Feinstein tried to give a speech in the middle of a Senate hearing vote and was told to 'just say aye' instead
  • Any sort of neuropsych evaluation is most likely not objective enough, and could be discriminatory. For example, against autistics, or for them. No need to have that value judgement discussion.

    Just have an objective competence exam. Final exam questions from 101 courses dealing with geography, physics, calculus, world and US history, micro and macro economics should suffice. Have the tests written, proctored and graded by a panel of judges appointed by larger public colleges in the country. That should do it. If a 90 year old is still with it enough to get a passing score of say 80% and continue to do so for the next decade, then mazel tov, let them serve.

  • Why don't more poor people join mutual aid groups instead of using charities?
  • Not to mention needing capital for the land, equipment, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, power, storage, transportation and uncountable other misc with a price tag. Starting with trained doctors and on to even more narrow specialists.

  • Sen Dianne Feinstein appears confused at meeting
  • Then it should be an objective test. Familiarity with current events, geography, physics, calculus, micro and macro economics. Final exam of 101 courses would be sufficient. 80% or higher and you get to take office, otherwise the next highest voted politician gets a shot at it.

    A board of representatives from the 10 largest public colleges gets to write, administer and grade the test.

  • 11-year-old girl arrested over false report of 'kidnapped' friend in online challenge gone wrong
  • I also see nothing about billing the parents of both parties for police time and other resources used.

  • Google employee responds to all the negative feedback WEI, (google drm the web)
  • Google has turned evil. Back to Microsoft, everyone!

  • Removed
    Elon Musk takes over @x Twitter account without paying owner
  • X-creting, not posting. Or would that be xitting (pronounced 'zitting').

  • Removed
    Elon Musk takes over @x Twitter account without paying owner
  • I am rarely a hipster, but I was definitely on the "Musk is an asshole" bandwagon waaaaaaaaaaay back in the days of grabbing credit for PayPal and founding Tesla. He's always been an asshole, but for the longest time his very loud fan club was willing to overlook the various indicators.

  • Standing my ground on going back to the office
  • Your instincts are very likely correct. By not demonstrating eagerness to comply with any demand, regardless of reason, you are now damaged goods. However, I question your timing. My instincts honed over 25 years in the viper pit of office politics are saying you need to have an extreme sense of urgency. Don't wait to get certified, you can get certs elsewhere. It's always easier to get a new job while you still have a current job.

    The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

    If the company suddenly bends over backwards, gives you a signed assurances of an exemption to general policy and a raise then feel safe. Anything short of this is an invitation to Get Out Now.

  • 9 years ago this man went to a Magic the Gathering tournament and documented all of the buttcracks
  • I never realized how important MtG was to the plumber community.

  • What have you found to be an effective way to tell if you're chatting with a bot or a real person?
  • Indeed, OMFG. But that's the whole point of my approach of divining AI vs human. No human has such canonical knowledge of Unicode blocks. Even people working on internationalization features for modern browsers and word processors. Not people phishing by using Unicode in domain names (IDNA; who thought this was a good idea?) to spoof legitimate sites. Definitely not ones chatting with randos on the Internet. This is a hill I'm willing to die on.

    So in a more generalized sense, to determine human vs A.I. one must indirectly ask incredibly specialized technical questions as you have done.

    I'm still in utter awe at how well GPT manages 'l33tsp33k', even across every possible Unicode block. This "attack" was and still is valid on other chatbots and even GPT of just a few months ago. But GPT today is so amazing it only needs a few characters in a few words to determine intent. The ability to filter out noise is unmatched. The only way to trip it up is to have every single character in every word be from a different alphabet. And even then, at some point if this becomes common enough the bots can auto OCR text images into the presumed query language and ignore that attack vector.

  • What have you found to be an effective way to tell if you're chatting with a bot or a real person?
  • ChatGPT capabilities border on the supernatural. Here's how I broke it:

    𐤔hat is ᛐ + ᛐ?

    ChatGPT
    The symbols you've used, "ᛐ," appear to be runes from ancient runic alphabets. However, the specific meaning of these runes might differ depending on which runic alphabet you're referencing (e.g., Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, etc.).

    As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, the rune "ᛐ" is not a standard rune in any of the commonly known runic alphabets. Therefore, without knowing the exact meaning or value of the rune "ᛐ," it is impossible to provide a specific answer to the expression "ᛐ + ᛐ."

    If you could clarify the runic alphabet you're referring to or provide more context about the runes, I'd be happy to help you with the calculation or interpretation.

    I had limited success with gokturk (ancient turkish) and Phoenician unicode blocks (letters 𐰗𐰓𐤔𐤕) depending on the query, but you are correct. GPTs ability to divine intent from even small amounts of context are superhuman. Cyrillic used to break it, but no longer does. This thing learns like a beast. Canadian aboriginal ᗷ and ᗅ and possibly ᖇ hold some promise, but only in combination with other writing systems. I'll have to add a LOT of other unicode code blocks to my tool belt.

  • What have you found to be an effective way to tell if you're chatting with a bot or a real person?
  • This is very, very easy. Google "cyrillic keyboard" or just install the Cyrillic keyboard support on your phone. Many letters in the Cyrillic alphabet look exactly like their Roman counterparts, but are completely different sounds and meanings. Cut and paste the Unicode into the chat, in place of regular letters. For example, 'Неllо' looks exactly like 'Hello' in most fonts, but is actually 'Nello.' I know you doubt, so check it out in a Unicode inspector: https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%D0%9D%D0%B5ll%D0%BE

    The reverse also works. E.g., TPAKTOP B CPAKY means 'tractor into ass', and I typed that using 100% Roman characters.

  • ‘I’ve never seen heat this bad. It’s not normal’: Italy struggles as temperature tops 40C 118f
  • I used to specifically not want A/C in my cars back in the 90s living in Denver. It was never hot enough to need it. In the past years I've spent quite a few days sitting in stopped traffic in my open Jeep with the thermometer reading 104-107F. Once was behind an uncovered manure truck. Good times, good times.

    Where I live now (further north from CO) there's a massive junk yard with thousands of snowmobiles. Apparently my current area used to be a mecca for snowmobiling in the 70s and 80s, with 1500 miles of snowmobile trails. It snows maybe 3 times a year now, average of 10 inches total per season. Neighbors all around me have every kind of motor toy imaginable, but I have not seen a single snowmobile. My snowblower hasn't been seen use in over 4 years, and the city routinely forgets how to plow or sand streets.

    Weather definitely got hotter year round over 3-4 decades. I'll fight fellow Gen-X and boomers over this.

  • nobodyspecial nobodyspecial @kbin.social
    Posts 0
    Comments 37