• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I work in an industry known for frequent large layoffs, so I’m making the connection that many former employees take it personally and say things out of spite. I’m not entirely taking the operators word for it, since he clearly has a reason to be pissed off. As I said though: easy to believe

    Yeah, it’s tough here because all wars, especially this one, are so horrible. I do feel sorry for those caught up in it and who suffer the consequences, and I know most Russians are not there entirely willingly. Still, Russia is the perpetrator, they are the cause of this suffering, death, and destruction, and this soldier was clearly participating. He is part of the problem so better him than his intended victims



  • That’s one of the many things I don’t get. How did he get elected the first time, how could anyone have voted for someone with a long history of stuffing contractors? Bankruptcies? Questionable tax practices? This guy came in as a well known real estate developer fraud who ripped people off: individuals, small businesses, irs, etc, for decades. How did this ever fly in the first place?



  • I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.

    OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)

    When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up



  • Just like always, it depends on how you define or redefine ai. For example, what used to be called ai has been very successful in photo processing. The same thing is going to happen: some portion or incarnation of the current generative ai will be successful, but it will be dismissed similar to “it’s just machine learning, not ai”

    I have a lot of hope for Apple’s approach, where they are incorporating it as tools into specific capabilities, and prioritizing privacy. While there’s no direct profit, it should help sell a lot more devices with ever higher tech specs. I also like their “private cloud” model that has a lot of potential beyond private ai





  • Pension funds are multi-billion dollar funds, so they can afford their own brokers to directly buy a whole company in one-shot, with no repeat business.

    They’re not usually run this way. Generally pension funds are the same as your 401k, but on a bigger scale. They also usually focus more attention n managing risk and expenses…… I used to work for a company that did exactly this for some insane number of hundreds of billions of dollars

    You might invest part of your 401k in a public shared sp500 index fund, a pension plan might invest part of its money in a private sp500 index plan managed solely for them, usually with lower fees







  • Recruiters are essentially salesmen. They want to have a full dossier of product (you) when they talk to a potential client. They might also job hop among agencies, and bringing a full dossier of product helps them get their new job. It’s much easier to build that product inventory with ghost jobs than it is to actually work directly with someone looking for a job.

    Maybe it’s my limited experience, but I’ve never worked for an employer that did this, as far as I know. Any opening was real at the time it was posted. However we’ve held onto people if we expect another opening or we like them even though they don’t fit but can’t promise a new opening until we get it approved …… or maybe we got the ok to hire and started the process but were shut down by bad numbers somewhere but hope that will change again