If you buy your phone unlocked, you can get Red Pocket which is extremely cheap for service compared to most post paid plans. You can get ~5gb data and unlimited everything else for 20 a month on AT&T. And then if you go to Europe you can just buy a cheap Sim while there and pop it in.

If you're not picky about the phone, I have gotten sub 300 USD phones for the last 2, first lasted 4 years and I'm about 6 months into the second. Honestly there's not much I feel like I'm missing, except spending way more money.

Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I don't understand why they can't jusy write on their website or publish an email newsletter or RSS feed. Why do we need anything like Twitter for organizations?

To believe otherwise, you must believe that business leaders and hiring managers don’t know what they’re doing – that they are blindly following tradition or just lazy. [...]you’d need to believe that businesses have simply overlooked a better way to hire. That seems naïve.

IDK, Has the author ever worked anywhere? Talked to anyone who worked somewhere? READ SOME POSTS ON REDDIT ABOUT WORKING SOMEWHERE? The amount of times no one could understand why a business does what it does, seemingly to its own detriment, is staggering.

They are right that it's wrong to believe that people with college degrees don't have skills - some do. The issue is that it appears to practically be non correlated to each other. I've seen people with college degrees who clearly learned very little during that experience. I've seen people with no degree be very knowledgeable and skilled.

The other obvious question in regard to hiring is - if going to college was necessary to do a job, then surely the degree would matter. However, outside of limited situations, the thing they're looking for is a degree, not one related to the job they're hiring for. Also, degrees are stupidly expensive which at least has to drive up wages a little anytime there's some competition in the labor market.

I'd argue the biggest obvious mark against a degree really doing much is that it's relevant at most for the first job. After that, no one asks to see the degree, or cares what your GPA was, or whatever - because the much better skill assessment is actually doing a job in the field. At that point, while it's tradition to require a degree, it's literally a check box. If these companies thought about it better, they'd realize the hiring mostly ignores degrees for any position outside of literally the first one out of college. An obvious solution to this problem IMHO would be the probationary period. Set it for 6 months renewing for some period. You need some time having someone do the actual task to really know if they're going to be a good fit anyway.

If only there was actually a good car dashcam, but every time I go down that rabbit hole I give up frustrated. The quality (build, mounting, video, whatever) is shit in pretty much all of them, and the "passable" ones look like a web cam from 2005 still.

Really only if you eat a lot of rice. For once a year or so, a pot on the stove works just fine. The actual benefit I've see for ricecookers is how well they can hold the rice for hours ready to go, but that's more of a commercial benefit I think.

I can't see why you'd pay for a service that still had ads? It's why I've never gotten cable - if I'm paying, I don't want ads.

I see this a lot online, but I have to ask - where are people even getting exposure to any lending with a full call at any time option by the lender? Like all my personal debt has defined payment terms, just cause the bank might like the money back sooner, they can't come to me and demand a full repayment in any circumstances.

Why would people expect this for government debt? (this all ignores that the US didn't go to China and ask for a loan, China bought treasuries on the open market - it's like owning bonds, not being a bank).

This "he isn't an idiot" or "not enough of an idiot" is the wrong way to think about things. Smart people believe all sorts of dumb things, and plenty of smart people can delude themselves, especially when they surround themselves with "yes men".

The other thing is X isn't the only social media platform, nor was ever a particularly large one as users go. Getting rid of Twitter just pushes people to threads, mastodon, bluesky and others. It doesn't actually shut down much speech at all.

I think the non-conspiracy thinking is just - Musk was addicted to twitter, liked saying edgy and engaging stuff and because of what was more of a boast but legally was a binding sort of offer to buy ended up forced to buy Twitter. The legal forces were well documented at the time. Now that Musk has Twitter, he decided to make it into what he always professed it should be, along with his egomania has made it more and more like any number of "free speech absolutest" spin offs that turned into right wing cesspools that regular people find less and less appealing, and advertisers really find concerning.

The biggest issue I see is self serving fuckwads don't go away. They'll import themselves a la Putin if they think they can get away with it. They'll create their own institutions a la the Mafia if there's nothing else.

The second problem is there are large groups of people who want to be under some Authority to the extent they get populist / fascist stuff going or invent ones like in Religion.

I just don't think people "freed from institutional authority" are inherently going to not just recreate it, probably worse...

I swear that companies are really misunderstanding how most people interact with brands, or I am. But given recent events, I think it's the companies. On another topic, for reasons I cannot fathom, Schwans home frozen food delivery is re-branding from Schwans' (which is hard for me to spell, but easy to say) that it's been since the 1950s and is widely understood and recognized. What are they re-branding to? It sounds like they got right up to date with mid 90s Internet company branding, going with Yelloh! (I think). No one wants to say Yelloh!. It looks stupid, and somehow more out of fashion than their old logo.

We've got whatever the heck is going on with Twitter/X, we've got this (Yea, no one recognizes HBO, that's OLD./s) The Great Courses Plus renamed Wondrium (which is again, giving up a rather well known brand in some niches with an obvious idea that it's slightly different as a subscription). At least this doesn't entirely sound / look stupid, and they added content when doing it, but still.

I probably could go on, but just... why? IDK - have you ever looked at an existing brand and thought - oh, that's too dated? Usually companies pull this stuff to "trick" people into thinking it's a different company, like when Blackwater became whatever, or Jeep etc became Stellantis. Such self owns.

I know at least 2 Republicans that when you actually talk about individual policy preferences it comes across as moderate democrat. One of them was a virulent PRO masker because of their job.

I think people just don't pay attention to actual policies, it's all just the soundbites and controversy.

Didn't google basically kill XMPP by "working" with the standard and then getting a huge amount of users on Google, then dropping the standard leaving most people who wanted to communicate on the now locked in google program? I swear I heard that.

It also makes Amazon a lot less enticing to shop on. If I want cheap shit, I'd just as soon get it cheaper direct from China (Temu, AliExpress). If I want brand name products (IDK - do they even exist anymore?) I need to go to like Best Buy I guess.

The first one is just split tunneling which is a design feature for most organizations using VPN, so any company paying for this for their employees, and many using stuff like OpenVPN explicitly want that feature for good reasons.

The second requires both intercepting DNS (which I think is getting harder all the time with DNSSEC etc) and you not using a server certificate to authenticate the actual VPN server (unless I really misunderstand what's happening here). Most public VPN servers don't seem to be configured to work as you say (not send traffic for their server / site over the tunnel) - at least OpenVPN with common configurations will send traffic over the tunnel as far as I've been able to determine. Some details to reproduce this would be helpful. The paper isn't currently available, but I'm still wondering how they're adding a static route to the client unless they can in fact terminate the VPN connection and pass back config rules different from the client config file.

If he hasn't been scared by Xerox, Brother, and Epson, he won't be scared by a FLOSS printer. At this point, the only people who buy HP printers are those who don't even google it and remember hearing the laserjets were good circa 1995.

Get Fdroid on Android and use Antenna Pod. Idk about podcasts on PC.

I think this is showing both how much your data is worth, and what it costs to actually run / use these services. People don't want to pay, but I've always thought pay for a service was a potentially much less shitty business model. However, instead what we often get now is both pay for a service and still privacy invasion / selling our data. And who's going to trust Facebook here?

Idk about getting struck down, but it seems like laws inside your jurisdiction are going to stand in a way laws outside don't really. Where it gets tricky is going to be swaths of the country where certain people can't go for fear of being arrested. Feels like a loosening of federalism to me and more like different countries in a way.

I just still don't get how you avoid the problem of physics causing latency that just isn't great for gaming.

Dismissing the allegations because of who made them was always ad hominem. It's also a pretty bad look to hold faculty and the president of the university to noticeably lower standards than the students.

I kind of feel like it's a bit overwrought - and not supported by current tech anyway. I could predict where the tech will go, but I don't think that's possible to do in a reasonable way over a useful time-span for this.

Lets look at the proposed affected jobs(I'll leave out the ones I just don't have enough knowledge about to even hazard a guess):

Interpreters + Translators: I haven't tried GPT for this, but I imagine it's likely not too much more affecting than google translate. For people and situations where machine translation is good enough - this has been happening for quite a while. I have my doubts that this will change the trajectory of that field. Translation seems like something that you can't "edit after the fact" - you have to do the whole translation anyway to see if the machine translation is right or missing important non-literal parts.

Writers and Authors: I can see this speeding their work up, and enabling people who might have story ideas and be a decent editor but not a good first draft writer to become authors. However, writers have been dealing with both lowered standards for technical writing and content glut for many years - I don't think this changes that appreciably.

Public Relations Specialists: I feel like this is massively devaluing the psychology and experience in PR. It might well replace press release writing, but I just bet there's more there than is obvious to everyone.

Tax Preparers: If you're doing fine with TurboTax - you've been doing this for decades now. If you can't solve it with existing traditional tax software, it's often because you just aren't sure about vague tax rules, or complex tax rules. And you usually want someone else to take on some liability and ability to represent you if you're audited. I don't see how GPT changes this fundamentally.

Mathematicians: Really? It's horrible at math.

Proofreaders and Copy Markers: Also really? I feel like for a while at least there's going to be more proofreading of the output of GPT for factual content and style.

Like all of the supplement industry, it will depend on a couple things. One, what are the regulations in your country? How well are they enforced?

In the US, there is next to no regulation or enforcement, so often these things don't contain what they claim to, or not the amount claimed. So you're looking at third party testing groups or just trusting the manufacturer. Mostly the adulteration isn't harmful, but generally inert. So if there's very little or nothing there, it's most likely placebo.

Next - even if you do get the dose of what it claims - I think it's still very likely placebo, extremely weak or extremely variable effect. "alternative medicine" that has consistent effects on most people every time even when they don't know what they're taking isn't usually alternative anymore - we just call it medicine.

All that said - I personally don't see any issue with using a placebo for psychological issues - "it's all in my head" so applying a "just in my head" fix seems reasonable as long as it's working for me.

I actually always thought there was a possibility that what happened to AOL might happen to Google / Facebook / etc. I.e. people inherently don't like extreme walled gardens, and will splinter off into more open, more random, more innovative spaces. I think the pendulum had swung back over to an early AOL like very limited set of 5 or so big "platforms", and the issues with that were seen again, just like in the late 90s when people were ditching AOL for "the real Internet" en masse.

So Signal has stories but I can't figure out what it would be for.

I find it pretty easy to want other laptops because I don't use Apple stuff because I dislike their UX. I know I'm weird but if I never have to get close to OSX or iOS I'm pretty happy.

I sort of miss the more 'niche' but non techie / nerdy communities but just find myself reading books again, which is also less stressful.

There's actually a service called jolly rodger that you can forward calls to that uses AI and such to try and do this. It's pretty cheap, under $20 a year (and also does voicemail and transcribes the calls to a text). I think it does cut down on junk calls, they tend to just hangup.

• Personally I hate the everything is flat with no borders. Like - what was wrong with buttons looking like buttons (3D and an animation WHEN YOU CLICKED THEM)? Now it's like - what's the button?
• The "hamburger menu" - why can't we have the traditional set of menus across the top? No, now it's an extra click for no reason.
• Why do we keep adding clicks to get to stuff? Why is right click -> more -> open in file manager -> rightclick -> properties so I can figure out where a shortcut GOES in Win10?
• Hiding scroll bars, and not having the little buttons on the sides. Now I can't easily click on down or up to slightly scroll when I need to look for something, no on very log docs I'm just wildly swooping around.
• Ever more clicks to do anything.

I actually think the root problem here is the minimalist design ideas. The problem is minimalism isn't some design handed down by God or something, and it works horribly when what you're trying to interact with ... is basically a Swiss Army Knife x 2 trillion. I find minimalism nice for a vase, or a single purpose tool or device. But for computers it either makes them ever harder to actually use (now we've got docks we have to carry around with our laptops so we can plug in a USB device or flash drive or monitor vs just having the ports on the laptop because... well having a bag of wires, dongles, and a dock is so minimalist right?), or basically hides / removes functions.

Remember all the things you could do in Windows 98 that you can't do in Win10? Like one control panel to go to. You could set window, menu etc fonts and colors. etc. I mean simple UI things - no, we've been slowly trying to go back to a very limited OS interface.

Granted, I don't use Windows for most stuff anymore, so it doesn't bother me as much, but some of this stuff just follows you. Gnome does this crap so I can't use that anymore and have to look for forks from the programs that have a usable UI.

I'm very much WFH a huge percentage of the time. I don't think I'm ever going to willingly go back daily or even weekly. There's little to no point. Our society also should want to encourage WFH as much as possible just for environmental benefits.

Not to be an idiot - but where should people post this stuff? I mean, I do find it interesting occasionally, and like to see what other's think, not so much complaining that it was posted at all.

Yea, I just wish more niche communities would come to Lemmy, but most of the interesting ones are actively not tech savvy en mass, and so are lucky to figure out reddit I guess. Or Discord maybe, which sucks as a reddit replacement.

Common industry trope - same with climate change EVs vs industrial processes. We keep asking 7.9 billion people to attack the 5% or less left of an issue that maybe they with full collective action could dent, while just pretending that nothing can be done by the IDK 100,000 people running the industrial processes responsible for like 70% of the problem.

I swear, it's the latte / avocado toast financial advice. Yes, if I drop $100-$200 a month habit it'll make up for the $4,000 a month unsustainable living expenses.

What's interesting is this is also kind of a circle of tech moment too. At least for me, search has been sort of killed (or google search anyway), but it's just back to the Internet of 1997 again, where we have "sort of useful" "search engines", some walled gardens like AOL was, and maybe webrings or the original sort of Yahoo! curated link / subject sites / lists.

Try Vivaldi, the spiritual successor of the original Opera team.

I think in some ways this will further separate the urban from the rural. Basically everyone I know works hard to avoid businesses in cities that don't have easy parking when you have to drive in 30 miles or more to get to them. But then again, maybe for much larger cities it works, at the cost of there being different shopping and eating locations for people who live in the city within walking distance and those who need to drive. Not sure how much the "social mixing" actually helps cohesion given existing rural / urban divides, but I can see this leading to people who basically are even more in 2 completely different countries. Of course, IDK how you fix this - NYC has park and ride set up, but the vast majority of third tier cities do not, or run one bus (that no one who can possibly avoid it wants to ride) twice a day, one in and one out.

Gnucash can do this and is floss so won't really go away.

Is this like the opposite of "go woke go broke"? It sure seems like you lose more money being a hate monger as a public company, or maybe that's just Musk?

I can't speak to k8s but there are reasons you need clusters to handle absurd amounts of data with high uptime and high networking performance.

The reason the streamers are creating their own content is licensing breakdowns and copyright law. I don't know why everyone thinks they can out Netflix the Netflix streaming service, but they also think they'll make more money trying to do it. It's like Amazon deciding to somehow make their delivery system better than UPS. Or cheaper.

I think it either calls into question the supposed economies of scale and core business competency theories or they're not doing it to save money / make money at all.

Maybe they can all go to an instacart model or something like Amazons auto checkout model. Or just have actual cashiers. Maybe everything is in vending machines. Idk, but the current experience in retail mostly is horrible and I want to avoid it if at all possible.