• 16 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • While I agree with the sentiment, let’s just go down that list:

    • Where he lives: DMV and taxes cover that
    • What he looks like: DMV covers that
    • How many devices are on the network: The vast majority of people have no reason to care about that. Hell. I am not even sure I are about that
    • How many kids he has and their ages: Taxes and social security
    • What times they are home: Their internet usage patterns and likely cell towers logging their sim cards
    • What types of food they have delivered and how often: Traffic cameras and asking uber eats or whatever. Although… this goes back to “how important is this data?”
    • Guest info: See above regarding sim cards

    I 100% agree it is important to be aware of what data a given device/vulnerability has access to. It is ALSO important to figure out if that is actually any new data being available and to think about what orgs/agencies would be a concern.

    Because maybe you DO care about the principle of it (I know I do). But “It is the principle of the matter” is just as ineffective an argument as “I have nothing to hide”.


  • Yeah.

    I can’t speak to Mexico. But, at least in the US, video games very much have been a pipeline for both rehabilitation of the military’s image and direct recruitment. It is what leads to generations that believe tier ninety special force operators are the greatest people ever which both provides “They know what they are doing and have their reasons” and “I want to be one of those”

    I am not aware of any cartel friendly games (unless you REALLY disliked Fifty Cent, I guess?) but I wouldn’t immediately rule this out IF it is part of a wider media push.


    Violent video games do not make you violent. But “cool guys doing cool shit” makes people want to “do cool shit”. There is a reason (para)militaries around the world tend to cooperate with, and outright fund, so much media that glazes them. Hell, military/spy porn is sometimes so good that it makes you ALMOST stop making jokes about how Sullivan Stapleton should play Hank Hill in a live action KOTH (that man wishes he had Hank Hill’s ass).






  • Sorry, you want to replace wooden pallets with hermetically sealed metal boxes? Maintenance costs go through the roof and it might be worth reading up on what they actually use to make those seals (hint: Polymer compounds). You also drastically increase the weight at every step AND add very significant logistics issues (can’t have crates too close to the door in case it is rainy). All of which translate to increased consumption of fossil fuels.

    Again: We don’t overuse polymers because of wanting a summer home in northern Canada. Polymers are used because of their materials properties being… quite frankly insane. Super light material that can take a beating while providing strong water/weather resistance. Like… your “let’s put things in a metal box” is already solved by just wrapping some fairly cheap plastic wrap around things. Shipping a hundred plastic bottles uses MUCH less energy/fuel than shipping a hundred glass bottles for weight of the bottles alone. And the glass bottles need significantly more packaging/protection to survive shipping which drastically increases costs on top of that.

    There is a LOT of room for improvement. EVERYONE hates paper straws but they are a really good idea that greatly reduces how much plastic ends up in a landfill. But people also rapidly realize that those paper straws need to be protected from creation to end use and… that is still going to be plastic. Optimally you are wrapping the box/stack instead of the individual straws so it is still a net gain, but… yeah.

    And there is a LOT of work going in to making greener plastics. But when you engineer out the material properties that made you use it in the first place… it is a cool novelty and great for marketing but it doesn’t really change the amount of plastics used in getting that to the point where someone feels good because they are using biodegradable utensils.


  • I would recommend going and actually looking at a stack of paper cups. They are pretty much universally in a plastic bag.

    Also, those cardboard (or even paper) boxes that printer paper come in? They get put in larger cardboard boxes and crates… which are generally wrapped in glorified plastic wrap before they get loaded into those metal trucks. And often stay wrapped on their pallets at the warehouse until they are set for their final destination.

    And, to be clear: That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is effectively the idea behind electric cars. Move the pollution/recycling burden away from the end user and keep it at the distribution center/power plant where more expensive efforts can be done to reduce waste/pollution. And… much like with “clean coal”, the end result tends to be dumpsters full of plastic on their way to the landfill because recycling is effort.

    But the idea is sound. Use the more robust polymers for shipping and long term protection. I just… still think 50 days is too little for anything even remotely close to an end user without a LOT of extra coatings (for example: Those paper milk cartons tend to have a LOT of wax… or polymers) which kind of defeat the purpose.



  • A lot of people in graphics design et al are contractors. They get hired for a job, do it with their own resources, and then move on. Those folk tend to need to provide their own software.

    Aside from that? Companies DO provide software. But, at least in my experience, early career staff decide they actually NEED matlab or some other super proprietary nonsense and take it upon themselves to get the tools they “need”. Which results in their manager having to have The Talk about why you don’t do that in an actual company and how they are REALLY lucky you are the one that saw them because that is a fireable offense.



  • Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.

    Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.

    Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.


  • Nowhere near it.

    The “corporate roles” are likely a case of downsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.

    And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.




  • Let’s say you are a graphics designer. You use Adobe Illustrator and you pirate it. You work for Innertrode either as a contractor or a full time employee. You make their new logo.

    Adobe’s legal team are bored. They see that new logo. They know it was made with Illustrator because of some of the visual quirks/tools (or, you know, because it is anything graphical so of course it uses Adobe). They know that Innertrode doesn’t have a license. So they call up Lumberg and say “what the fuck?”.

    Lumberg then calls the person who was in charge of the new logo and they point at you.

    If you are staff? You were given training not to pirate anything. It is all your fault. Innertrode buys a few years of a license and apologizes and fires your ass and makes sure to tell everyone they know about you. Or you are a contractor and you signed an agreement saying you had valid licenses for everything and they just give your contact info to Adobe and move on.

    And Adobe MIGHT just want to shake you down. Or they might want to make an example and sue the fuck out of some people.

    Also… it is a lot of hearsay for obvious reasons, but there are very strong rumors that some of the more prominent cracks tend to add digital watermarks for the purpose of automating this.