dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
13d ago
I wonder if "build more housing!" is the "decriminalize drugs!" of the latest generation and once we finally kick that into high gear we'll reap a bunch of unintended side effects that are horrible but nobody wanted to think about at the time.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
13d ago
It really just sounds like they want a minimum wage increase so that barista served coffees cost $20. But that has other problems.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14d ago
Starbucks used to be a well regarded employer. I think what changed was the macroeconomic conditions. They went from being a novel third place coffee house with charming exposed duct work and chill vibe to being kind of a place that serves something you can get at five other stores in the vicinity and they want you out the door ASAP.
Perhaps they can be blamed for not having a monopoly on the chill coffee shop vibe forever, but the fact remains most coffee shops don't make much money. No barista anywhere is buying a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14d ago
After tariffs I don't think I can handle becoming an expert on rare earth metals this year too. I'll just go to production with your opinion.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14d ago
To be clear I'm not saying the CEO of Starbucks earned his pay. That's a separate topic. I'm saying it really has nothing do with how much baristas are being paid. The localized economics of the individual Starbucks location matter much more and the union, which presumably wants to improve pay for baristas, is barking up the wrong tree by making the conversation about the CEO's pay. The reason baristas aren't paid more is because the work they're doing is not that valuable, and no amount of collective bargaining will make value spontaneously appear.
I am not saying you cannot criticize the CEO's pay package. I'm simply saying his high pay is not at any realistic expense of the rank and file employee. It's irrelevant to the economics of the Starbucks barista's local monkeysphere. You may as well be complaining that athletes get paid too much for playing sportsball.
So sure, the CEO's pay has little to do with the hourly pay of workers. But, what kind of boot licker looks at a $95mm salary and says he earned it without asking what his VORP is? Because I'm sure they couldn't have done too much worse for $50mm.
Well. How much would you demand to be CEO of Starbucks?
EDIT: I'm not trying to be flip. Being the CEO of Starbucks sounds terrible. They're in decline, having been badly mismanaged, and competition is becoming more fierce than ever. And a ton of their stores have become unionized and the NLRB is saying shit like you must re-open closed stores. Figuring out how to stick your nose up Trump's ass is almost certainly in your future.
If I'm hot shit enough to be taking interviews with boards of directors of $100 billion companies I would not come to Starbucks for cheap.
Again, none of this is to say my OP is about what the CEO deserves. That's separate.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14d ago
I really enjoy getting downvoted on Reddit for doing the "CEO pay"/"# workers" = "incredibly small number"
This is like 50% of what drives me crazy. What are people clicking downvote even doing? Do they think you're making the very easily checked facts up? Are they mad that you're spoiling a good circle jerk? Have you simply signaled that you're a member of the outgroup and must be destroyed? This is a fact that should cause a complete crash to their worldview and it does. not. register.
I have a really hard time with CEO vs worker pay discussions. It kind of drives me crazy. Lets take Starbucks, since I'm currently hearing unions complain about the disparity right now. The argument mostly feels like math blindness, but maybe my problem is that I'm bringing an abacus to a knife fight.
The Starbucks CEO makes $95 million a year. They argue this is outrageous because their employees only make $20/hour or whatever.
Why not complete the math? What if we took the Starbucks CEO, fired him, and redistributed his $95 million a year a salary to the workers? Well, the 361,000 workers would see their pay bumped by about $1 per day. It's really hard to get across that the workers at each Starbucks already capture a huge portion of the value of the cup of coffee they serve (aside from real estate costs, cost of goods, etc). The Starbucks CEO takes perhaps a 1 cent from that cup.
This is a simple economic fact that seems almost impossible to communicate. Unionization won't improve worker pay on this front because there isn't much on a per unit basis that can be squeezed to give to workers.
I mean, the union could say lets increase the cost of coffee at Starbucks by 2.5x so that every employee can now afford a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house in their neighborhood but then their competitors would eat their lunch. And customers might actually be pretty outraged by the idea of paying $18 for a blended coffee plus tip. So, the unions don't try this angle.
In my town a particular annoying version of this argument is happening regarding a company that distributes Pepsi products in the region. They somehow ended up with a union 50 years ago which includes a pension. The company recently announced they can't fucking afford to give employees a pension anymore for the very not valuable job of delivering cases of Diet Pepsi to 7-11s all day and they want to switch them over to an 401k. This was an enormous outrage and the delivery people have been on strike over this for a year now. Going by the town's reaction, they seem to believe thousands of dollars per case of soda being delivered are waiting to be wrestled away from the evil classists who run the company.
It never occurs to anyone to learn to do something more valuable. Just that they need to win the fight against the classists, a fight that could not change anything if they won.
How much unrest is actually caused by failure to reason through 9th grade math regarding your personal conditions?
Is any of this even about actually improving worker conditions? I know it's cliche to be skeptical of unions but I honestly don't understand their modern presence at all.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
It took me way too long to realize cutting your dicks off wasn't all that contrived.
More on (1), I'm coming to terms with the idea that maybe I should just buy a black bicycle helmet sleeve and sew the LED strips into that.
This way I don't have to worry about adhesion bullshit and also can do any arbitrary design rather than trying to fit the exact pattern of the helmet.
@gattsuru did suggest this but I was not ready to hear it at the time.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16d ago
So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead.
How does that make sense? Bluesky is refusing to ban this person from the platform, therefore I'm moving to a distributed platform where it's not even possible to ban someone?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16d ago
Re: unfathomable idiocy
It demonstrates willingness to fuck shit up for Palestine, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. It's signalling her tribal affiliation and commitment.
I think this is stupid but I get it, I suppose.
I use ChatGPT pretty much all day every day but as a replacement for Googling mostly. It's great at pinging a dozen news sources on a issue and giving me more information than I'd get from reading a single article (and it's usually not wrong).
If I have trivial code to write in an unfamiliar framework it's good for that too.
It's also good for teaching me entry level stuff in a new topic faster than anything else.
It's generally better at telling me what's wrong if I paste an error message than anything I'd get from Googling.
And that's about it. And this is awesome, don't get me wrong.
But everything else it kind of sucks at. And not just ChatGPT, but Claude (including Claude code as well).
If I ask for help in a mature codebase it will almost certainly waste my time. Ask it for more subtle plot details of a popular sci-fi book that you just read and you will see how hard it hallucinates.
I would be quite worried about doing science or medicine with it if I can't rapidly verify its information.
It's sort of hard to see this improving very quickly? They've run out of gains from training on all of the internet. Inference costs are increasing exponentially but the gains in intelligence are only increasing logarithmically. You will note that the model that they used to win the Math Olympiad is very much not available to the public. Why? Perhaps because it cost millions in inference to do it.
It sure seems like other architectural breakthroughs are needed to keep scaling, and I don't see those as guaranteed.
Or, as Yannic Kilcher put it, "we have entered the Samsung Galaxy era of LLMs"
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16d ago
TRON bike lighting update.
(1) Unfortunately, 3M VHB tape doesn't adhere to bike helmets very well. It sticks okay to the bike helmet, but not at all to the silicone tubing the LED strips are inside of. I guess I'll use zip ties for prototyping while I try to find something else.
(2) In the meantime I was displaying each kids' personal logo in an OLED display on their respective ESP32 chip and I thought this would be easy-peasy to drive while updating WS2815 strips since FreeRTOS has "tasks" but it was crashing mysteriously when I tried to run both the light sequences and update the OLED display in separate tasks. So I just gave up and decided to make a single task state machine that would poll (with a 50ms sleep) to see if it was time to update each one. This mostly meant taking apart top-level loops to drive animations and replacing it with big switch statements that can do a small increment of work at each time. Usual game programming loops.
Got it 99% working nice and good before figuring out there was some underlying bug that was crashing my tasks in FreeRTOS in the first place and I could actually have simplified the logic quite a bit by using tasks. But whatever the single task state machine approach is working so I'll just roll with it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
17d ago
They were not just five random boys out for a lovely stroll at 10pm. Some were arrested for criminal behavior before the police even knew there was a rape victim.
But aside from their confessions there's almost nothing linking them to the victim.
I do think their confessions are worth something even if they're dumb kids under duress. Some confessed even with their parents present.
Sure is awkward that someone else confessed and DNA evidence links him to the victim though.
I don't think they're guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but it's definitely bizarre to turn around and conclude that they're heroes, which is how they're being treated by progressives (???)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
19d ago
shit happens. thanks for all of the stuff that goes well! we really appreciate it!
TRON bike lighting update.
Got a black helmet for myself and for one of my kids and did the final fit of the LED strips before the last push to get them all soldered together. Done, though after hot gluing and heat shrinking it all down, two of the ... 20 connections short out if they flex a bit, so I need to cut them open and redo. It's actually the second connection I did and also the third to last. It makes sense I would screw up near the start before I got the hang of it but near the end doesn't.
Anyway once those are fixed and showing enough durability it'll be time to VHB tape them to helmets.
I was all set to try some demo runs with ESP32-C3s I had on hand but then I noticed a variant which comes with a postage sized OLED screen so I obviously need that so it blinks each kid's name and maybe a cute bitmap design.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
27d ago
Oh, I see.
I would guess Suno's use case is the long tail of people who want bangin' music for their YouTube channel/podcast/home videos but have no idea how to license music or find someone to compose it for them.
As someone that occasionally DJs I have wanted music that hits a certain vibe but finding it on Beatport can take hours upon hours of listening. "Deep house, breathy female humming, no lyrics, sexy" is a really hard search but Suno will make you a couple in less time than it takes to listen. I may or may not use them because of quality issues but it does seem to be improving pretty quickly.
Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap.
There's at least, like, one semester of instruction required to learn a DAW. I can teach myself C++ and how to sys admin and use a DJ mixer. But a DAW just feels too hard without hand holding, same as Photoshop for me.
Being able to prompt Suno and get something fun to listen to (albeit flawed) feels liberating.
Is this going to be akin to that study about how good programmers working on mature projects did not save time using AI tools even though they thought they did?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
If people give themselves mental hard-ons for doing good things that's... still good right?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I'm sorry, but for me the Culture War doesn't become less damaging when the Right just forgives the left for literally murderign their spokespeople.
That's fair and completely understandable. I would absolutely not forgive and I would see that the perpetrator paid in full and would desire to personally squeeze the life out of them and I might tell the world.
But I'm also not broadcasting my Christian virtues to the world. It is not my moral-political framework. But it's theirs, and seeing a political figure show actual Christian commitment after decades of listening to hypocrisy from the Christian political right is refreshing! It makes me feel this movement could be a force of actual good and not just a slightly lesser evil!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I suppose "forgiveness" is not well defined here.
I didn't parse her as saying his killer should go free and live his best material life from this point forward. More like she does not hold hate in her heart towards him nor is pursuing a campaign to punish him with maximum suffering.
A good Christian is not necessarily compelled to stop by he wheels of justice from grinding him to bits if the operators so deem it necessary. I think they very much see the functions of the state as a bit distinct from their religion and something that they needn't overly concern themselves with.
They do in my state, which has a high minimum wage. And is where I hear them campaigning about unionizing.
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