Ask Lemmy

Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There's no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they're all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.

Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It's in their agreement that you'll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won't break.

The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the "Nam-Cam" that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you'll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.

Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.

How online ads actually work.

Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".

The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.

One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."

The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.

That's extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Truth

Technically not my industry anymore, but: companies that sell human-generated AI training data to other companies most often are selling data that a) isn't 100% human generated or b) was generated by a group of people pretending to belong to a different demographic to save money.

To give an example, let's say a company wants a training set of 50,000 text utterances of US English for chatbot training. More often than not, this data will be generated using contract workers in a non-US locale who have been told to try and sound as American as possible. The Philippines is a common choice at the moment, where workers are often paid between $1-2 an hour: more than an order of magnitude less what it would generally cost to use real US English speakers.

In the last year or so, it's also become common to generate all of the utterances using a language model, like ChatGPT. Then, you use the same worker pool to perform a post-edit task (look at what ChatGPT came up with, edit it if it's weird, and then approve it). This reduces the time that the worker needs to spend on the project while also ensuring that each datapoint has "seen a set of eyes".

Obviously, this makes for bad training data -- for one, workers from the wrong locale will not be generating the locale-specific nuance that is desired by this kind of training data. It's much worse when it's actually generated by ChatGPT, since it ends up being a kind of AI feedback loop. But every company I've worked for in that space has done it, and most of them would not be profitable at all if they actually produced the product as intended. The clients know this -- which is perhaps why it ends up being this strange facade of "yep, US English wink wink" on every project.

I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

The biggest "secret" is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell "famous people funerals at a reasonable price". You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I've found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.

I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.

I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.

No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.

Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.

Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.

Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.

The English language version often don't even translate, they write their own version, calling it "creative liberty". This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.

That's why claims of people of having "learnt Japanese from anime" are dubious in the best of cases.

Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I'm also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.

Phone systems that give you the prompt, "Press # for more options" etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don't enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.

Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.

Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)

Supermarket employee here. We have a "fresh" fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.

Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they're lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some .... people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.

Long story short, "fresh" fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.

I used to work as a contractor for an environmental remediation firm. All the waterways that you joke about not swimming in are actually full of some awful carcinogen. Old industrial plants dumped awful chemicals for years and years. Some of these issues are being slowly addressed, but regulation is always well behind the science. But often, if the liability is significant enough, companies will spend millions of dollars a year to kick the can down the road doing studies and monitoring so that they can avoid what would be hundreds of millions to actually remediate the problem.

The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.

Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.

[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you're getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you're getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don't need. We're forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It's insane, it's wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can't afford it, so they don't get the shit we give away to people who don't need it.

I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can't monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.

When your favorite band cancels their gig because the lead singer has "come down with the flu", that's industry code for "got too wasted, and is currently too busy getting alcohol and possibly drugs out of their system to perform".

I even worked one show that had to end after 20 minutes because one guy in the band was visibly under the influence, refused to play, talked to his hallucinations, then spent a few minutes talking to the audience about how his foot was evil and wanted to kill him, before the tour manager could drag him off stage. Then he tried to assault several backstage staff for not allowing him to cut off his foot. This was on a tour that promoted alcohol free rockshows btw, so we didn't provide alcohol to the artists backstage. God knows what he might've purchased from our local street dealers lol.

The next day in the papers, the headline says "[the band] cancels first week of reunion tour after flu outbreak" 🙃 Yes, of course

I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.

Lots of programmers and artists don't really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.

Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.

Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.

You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.

This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.

Afaik even in other "similar" industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.

Those little widgets that show that something is hot, trending or for a limited time are time based tags and don't represent any real analysis.

Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.

It really doesn't matter which one unless it's like super high end. And you've almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.