• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • That I am actually not sure about, since you can manipulate profit numbers much easier (see Hollywood accounting) compared to revenue. But making money is ultimately of course the goal for profit companies, so naturally where you can hurt them.

    If you decide to not go for a draconian finey where the margin of error are wider (doesn’t matter too much if you find 4 or 5 times profit, you still get the point across), then you need to at least try to put in some effort to be accurate.

    And 3% margin on a deal would be something you’d see from discount retailers like Aldi or Walmart.


  • Cost of doing business.

    I’d really like to know what their margins are, because if my math is right that $0.5m fine is roughly 3% of $17.1m. The very least a fine should do is siphon off all profits, more to account for those you do not catch and to be an effective deterrent. But even if you do want to incentivize companies to cooperate taking all profit should be the lower limit. And I have a really hard time imagining that margins in the chip market are that thin.









  • I don’t think they are rubbish, but if you are good at following plans, then a real one will be much more effective. It probably also depends on your fitness level. The more serious of a runner you are the less effective it’ll be. For beginners it probably doesn’t matter as much and any kind of running will yield results.

    Personally I am not structured enough to follow a plan, so sadly my training is probably inefficient in general. The way I use them is that I look at the daily suggestion before I start my run, and if it looks like something I am in the mood for, then I’ll do the workout. Otherwise I just ignore them.


  • I actually think all the posts talking about the size of communities, amount of memes on the frontpage and so on are wrong, since those will naturally change over time and are not fixed.

    Every platform will see changes in their user base to some degree. Reddit now is very different to Reddit 10 years ago. The same thing will happen to Lemmy: If growth continues we will see more engagement in niche communities, but also more low effort posts and reposts.

    Considering it doesn’t do anything fundamentally different to reddit in the way of being a content aggregator with comment section it will be a similar experience. It would be different if it e.g. had a function to make older posts resurface and stay relevant longer to foster longer conversations, or structure comments differently since right now the further down a chain you go, the less people will engage with it.


    Even if the average user doesn’t care about open source or federation, they’ll still benefit (and suffer) from the consequences.

    On a centralised platform like Reddit you are beholden to their will for better or worse, and incentives might change over time such in their case with taking investor money and going public. This can have consequences such as forcing out third party software (one of the events that brought a lot of people here), but also censoring specific content or taking away powers from moderators.

    There are downsides to it, since smaller, less professionally run instances might disappear at some point or have less reliability. But The upside is the option to choose and the resilience that should things change at one instance/community, you can switch without having to leave the whole ecosystem. And for that you do not have to be a moderator or volunteer

    The existence of different instances also to some degree helps identify users to some degree, the obvious choice being political instances like hexbear.


    The average user is not looking for NSFW

    That’s an assumption i’ll challenge. Looking at the amount of porn on the internet, the average person most definitely is looking for it. But that is probably a bit offtopic.



  • Hydro is very variable power output. If drought last year then can be a huge jump this year. Hydro in general, globally, averages 45% capacity.

    Yeah that could make sense, although the article doesn’t have enough information to know whether or not that is a factor.

    A good way to boost that is to use solar to power pumps bringing water up to the high side during the day.

    Pump storage is indeed very cool. However if one would count it twice when it is produced by solar and then again when getting it back from the storage, then that would majorly distort the statistic. You’d effectively count the produced amount of energy double (minus whatever efficiency loss you have from storing it).

    Europe is mostly densely populated. Onshore wind is struggling in west due to noise, but best locations are already taken is an issue as well.

    That is definitely true, however at least where i am from in Germany the NIMBY mentality is still going strong regarding onshore wind turbines. So i am reasonably confident that there would still be some decent spots left.


  • Overall that seems like great news.

    I am kind of surprised to see that hydropower grew more than solar. I’d have thought that solar with falling prices and relatively easy/flexible installation would be easier to scale, compared to hydro that probably needs specific locations and nowadays might also be under more scrutiny regarding the impact on local ecology.

    Onshore only growing by 6% is disappointing and I imagine a lot of it still has to do with resistance from nimby people and the likes?


  • Meinem Verständnis nach ist es auch bei Nobelpreisen nicht angebracht. Die werden jährlich ungefähr im gleichen Zeitraum vergeben. Und ehrlich gesagt sehe ich jetzt keinen Allgemeinnutzen, der daraus ensteht, dass man eine Minute früher davon erfährt. Klar auf persönlicher Ebene mag es toll sein das ganze sofort zu erfahren, aber dafür muss es dann halt andere Werkzeuge geben. Zum Beispiel irgendeinem Twitter/Mastodon Account folgen der das wiedergibt (denke mal die Nobelstiftung wird das haben?) oder es sollte einen Service geben den man abonnieren kann.

    Eilmeldugen sollten für wirklich wichtige Nachrichten vorbehalten werden, bei denen eine sofortige allgemeine Meldung einen großen Mehrwert erzeugt. Weltbewegende Ereignisse, große Umweltkatastrophen/Anschläge, Warnungen die Leib und Leben betreffen.

    Gleichzeitig reduziert jeder Missbrauch die Nützlichkeit von “Eilmeldungen”. Wenn soetwas wie “Deutsche Wirtschaft im dritten Quartal überraschend gewachsen” auf meinem Handy eine Benachrichtigung auslöst, dann stelle ich das ab, verpasse aber gleichzeitig tatsächlich potentiell relevante Informationen.

    Edit: wenn ein Wissenschaftsmagazin aus der Nobelpreisvergabe eine Eilmeldung macht, dann wäre das mMn ok. Es kommt also vielleicht auch auf den Kontext an über was man generell berichtet.




  • Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?

    I am pretty confident in guessing that they are not doing it for selfless reasons. Imo the reason is that the less information they give the user, the more you are beholden to the algorithm choosing for you.

    But depending how they hide it it actually might not just be users, but also companies that e.g. buy ads from them. The less information they get, the more they need to trust whatever metric google offers them


  • I recently read a plausible reason that I hadn’t thought of yet:

    Apple would need to include a specific flexible cable rated for continuous movement with the mouse. If the port was in the regular spot, then people would ofc also use it wired at times. However if buyers would use regular charging cables, then the experience would both be worse and the cables might get damaged over time from bending.

    I still think the main reason is simply that they value form over function, otherwise the shape would be more ergonomic, but it’s another interesting factor to consider.