• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • Insurance, benefits and labor expenses. Even in places with little worker protections there are costs that scale with the number of workers instead of the number of hours.
    A brief look indicates employers in India can expect to budget on the order of 18% of an employees take home per year for those expenses.

    There are some circumstances and places in the US where you don’t need to provide as many benefits to employees who work below 40 hours. Then you see employers hire more people and schedule them for just under the threshold to give them benefits.

    The answer is always because it’s cheaper for them somehow.



  • Some countries have more consumer protections than the US does, and consumers from there are wary of the lack of assurances a lot of us products have.

    To them, it’s like being told you have to pay for your food at the restaurant even if they mess up your order and you don’t get to eat it. It doesn’t matter that the waiter probably isn’t going to drop your food on the floor, throw it away and then give you a bill: the fact that they could makes you not want to go there.

    Likewise, your watch will almost certainly not break via factory defect after more than a month, but the expectation is that if they sell you something it’ll either last the expected lifetime or be suitably replaced or refunded on failure.

    We’re used to our particular blend of capitalist hellscape, so a company saying they’ll replace things if they’re obviously broken the moment you buy it, but beyond than you’re out of luck just seems normal. It’s on us to make sure they don’t mail us subtly damaged microelectronics and tiny lithium bombs.



  • If they hadn’t jumped the gun so badly and tainted the launch with crap results, Google would have been well positioned to do something profoundly useful.
    If it could actually extract useful information with citations and pointers for next steps and work as an interactive search, that would actually be really really useful.
    The whole “hallucinating health advice” and “being terrible” thing really set them back, even if they’ve improved.

    Like you said, I don’t really need help creating. I do need help remembering things or finding information: that’s why I’m using a search engine in the first place.

    At work, there’s a person who knows everything about the job. He regularly gets questions where the answer is just the correct way to find out for yourself.
    That’s what I want. “Oh, you mean X? Try looking at YZ. Oh, you wanted X, but in G conditions. That’s over in FOO. It’s confusing because reasons written down here…”





  • It’s even still a valid course of action if there’s literally no interest in making the world better.
    They’ve potentially found a way to make their nearly omnipresent e-commerce platform share a name with the operating system, which is coincidentally mostly developed by others. They get to associate their name with a few tens of billions of dollars of development effort for a fraction of the cost.

    To be clear, this isn’t bad or anything. It’s quite literally what a lot of the people doing all that legwork want. It just doesn’t require any altruism from valve. They make money selling games, and they sell more games when people think it’s easier to play them. A desktop with the ease of a console is a big selling point for a lot of people.



  • I thought the same thing, but per it’s suggestion I tried using it for fine tuning on the steam deck and I was pleasantly surprised. I’d never use it for for large motions, but on a game designed with mouse motion in mind it can be a little tricky to get those fine motions locked in.
    I tried with portal and it made it a lot easier to get little adjustments lined up that were tricky without it. Since it exclusively kicked in when I wanted it to it wasn’t as wacky as a lot of gyro controls are for games that focus on them, and I think it was as simple as “press your thumb a bit more roundly onto the joystick”.

    It’s not going to supplant the mouse for fast precise motions, but it at least means you can skip the wild overcorrection that sometimes happens with joystick on unoptimized configurations.