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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • I apologize if I misunderstood your point, but I truly fail to see how

    It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up.

    And

    public sentiment will grow up

    Isn’t calling the opposing view childish, which is a pretty strong sign that you’ve failed to actually consider what they’re saying. Same for calling them “brainwashed”.

    Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process

    Do they need to? You’ll find that most consumers don’t know how a car works or how industrial design is done but they still have justifiable opinions and concerns about the impacts and quantifiable attributes of them.

    If you actually look at what consumers are concerned about you’ll find that IP and copyright concerns don’t even make the list. People are concerned about the errosion of human connection and the diminishment of creativity. Privacy. Data usage and accountability.

    And what’s more, even if they were opposed for those reasons the consumer is still intrinsically correct about what they value. If consumers respect your work less because you trace AI art it doesn’t matter if you still creatively contributed, the value has been reduced.

    Telling consumers their preference is wrong because you want to be able to copy and trace AI content while viewing yourself as a creative is some backwards boomer shit. 30 years making casual games doesn’t give you lofty insight into the nature of the creative process. It’s just “trust me, I know more”. Same for trying to bolster your position by talking about betting on it.


  • Saying people who disagree with you are childish is a sure sign that maybe you’re not giving their argument proper consideration.
    Particularly when you’re arguing that the consumers are wrong about their feelings towards the product and need to grow up and adapt to how the producers want to make it.

    You’ve got a situation where people are seeing the assets, coding, design, and writing of games being moved from being human endeavors to being human supervised endeavors, while also being asked to pay higher prices.
    The producers and vendors aren’t entitled to consumers happily letting them do less work to deliver an inferior product for more money just because the graphics card manufacturer says it’s the way of the future.

    I don’t think anyone thinks you’re spending your time doing corporate graphic design putting yourself into your work. No one calls you an artist either.
    People buying art though have a reasonable expectation that the person they’re buying it from isn’t tracing ai content or random things from google.

    Keep in mind that if the “vocal minority” “grows up”, it means people stop paying you, because you’re the one not really adding anything to the equation.



  • 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…”




  • Oh, it’s definitely far bigger than GDP. Not all financial activity factors into GDP but it’s all part of the general movement of money that factors into inflation.
    A lot of money is used for things that aren’t counted as “production”, like investments or used goods.
    More than half of the worlds trade is conducted in dollars and there’s even larger flows of money involved in foreign exchange on a daily basis.
    There’s just so much money churning around that reducing the supply by $300B isn’t a big dent, particularly when most of it’s already effectively out of circulation.

    The ~$200 a day figure is right from bls and tracks consumer spending, notably including housing costs.
    https://www.bls.gov/cex/.
    It’s about $100 a day if you remove housing and transportation. About $25 on food and $10 on “fun” a day, with $16 of that food being consumed groceries.


  • It would actually do next to nothing if the entire supply were vanished right now. There’s about $300 billion in pennies in circulation. Around $850 per American, or roughly four days of average individual consumer spending.
    The economy as a whole does on the order of 10s of trillions of dollars of activity a day.
    Eliminating every penny would be less than a 1% reduction in liquidity, and even smaller in terms of actual use.



  • 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.