• 2 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

    Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

    Stress is relative, not absolute.


  • The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

    Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it’s a terrible design for people that aren’t the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.


  • Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

    First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

    As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

    For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

    Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

    Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.


  • In what context?

    In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

    I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.




  • Just as a quick FYI, on the PS4 (and presumably the PS5 too), if you click on any of the hidden trophies, you can press square (I think) to show the description of how to earn it. This wasn’t possible in the PS3 era, but it’s one of the upgrades they implemented in PS4. That’ll save you a Google search.

    As for why, as others have mentioned, it’s mostly for spoilers or hiding easter eggs that are more fun if you find them naturally rather than going out of your way looking to earn a trophy.




  • The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

    Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

    Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.



  • That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.

    Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.


  • Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

    As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

    Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

    The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.








  • Top Day is probably the best sort option so far, but I wouldn’t mind something that updates a little more frequently (e.g., Top for the past 4 hours). Additionally, I wouldn’t mind adding a decay mechanism that gradually pulls posts lower as time passes. As things stand now, if a post is immediately popular within the same hour it gets posted, it’ll remain as the #1 post on Top Day for the next 23 hours before immediately falling off the page altogether the second the post becomes 24 hours old. That leads to stale pages, and if people see the same posts every time they check this place, they’ll assume it’s a dead community and never come back. By implementing something that more gradually cycles content, if I check the site once at lunch and again a few hours later on my train ride home, I should get different content.


  • The problem with subscribing to communities at this point is the lack of content. I subscribed to a few different baseball communities, but none of them have anything other than maybe a welcome post or a few gameday posts without any comments. Communities are duplicated on a bunch of different instances too, which makes things a million times harder than it needs to be. I have no idea if one of the half dozen baseball communities I’m in now will make it big, if a new one entirely will make it big, or if they’re all doomed to never have content.