• 0 Posts
  • 149 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle




  • Good, so next time when your manager tells you that they will halve your pay; Rescind healthcare and force you to use your personal equipment for work. Then you can tell them “alright boss”. Because you can do without all those stuff you don’t need.

    Also, a briefing is just a summary. I know because I do them all the time. Guess what is it a summary of? A summary of goals to achieve, for a mission, a project or a task someone else or myself have to achieve. God protects whoever you end up managing. You’re the definition of the clueless manager who doesn’t even have any idea of what basic words mean.


  • People need a metric shitton of things to do their job well. When you’re told what to do, that’s a goal. If you’re told a deadline to fulfill, that’s a metric.

    I understand that people have taken the words in an exclusively derogatory mode. But you need minimum those two things to do any job. Else you’re just a nepo dickhead who gets paid for parading around an office and you’re the piece of shit interfering with the people who actually do have jobs to do.


  • Everyone needs metrics and targets, otherwise it is just dicking around and nothing useful gets done.

    The problem it that tech bros only half listened in social sciences class and choose the dumbest metrics and targets. Agile completely killed waterfall and specification development. In turn, using the equivalent of ignorance of the masses ticket systems on Jira. The worst of all worlds with commits, PRs and lines of code as metrics and a vacuous tick mark on user stories as goals. No wonder software development has been hell for decades.

    Software developers need to stop designing in the code and go back to designing on paper against specifications and unit tests. Thinking has always been the main work of a software developer, not just writing code. As for the AI side of the problem, the purpose of code is not just to be written, but to be read and understood by humans. AI coding trashes the ontological purpose for the existence of code.



  • Anyone trying to ditch Google for principled reasons, not just annoyance or fashion, skipped proton. Since their inception they stink of corporate BS. It was apparent from the beginning that the privacy push was just a coat of paint. They still belong to the oppressor class and will defend their own, despite of what the marketing says. Always look at actions, not pretty marketing and fancy manifestos.



  • Just use your brain. Nintendo has roughly 8600 employees, 3000 in Japan alone. Salaries are the vast majority of indirect operating costs in any company. If Iwata halving his salary pays to avoid layoffs, then his salary had to be a huge percentage of Nintendo’s operating costs and the WiiU failure would’ve been the least of their problems.

    Nintendo regularly reports operating costs in the order of several billions of dollars quarter over quarter, a majority of them would be salaries or manufacturing. Even if Iwata was paid a single billion dollars a year, and halved that, it would barely amount to a rounding error on the accounting. It was just a PR movement, and most Japanese salary men recognize it as such. It is something done for media clout because “we will just pay you with the piggy bank money” doesn’t add any drama worth a headline.

    And Nintendo working conditions have always been controversial. While they are by far not the worst of Japanese corporate employers. They are not exactly saints either, falling into the same patterns that plague the Japanese office culture. Specially the abuse of employees qualified as independent contractors and unpaid overwork. It triggered a labor complaint in the US in 2022. They have become a bit better very recently, apparently. But it is still one of the oldest and most traditional fucking companies in the planet, they carry some troubling organizational culture sometimes.


  • That one is always misleading. It’s a known Japanese corporate move. As the article says, called “hansei”. Culturally regarded as an empty public gesture done exclusively to save the company’s public image. It works as a PR move, and it obviously did here, since it happened in 2013 and people still talk about it.

    But, it actually does nothing financially, and usually none of the money saved goes anywhere. Nintendo avoided layoffs because they hoard liquidity. Have done so since the 80’s. Their revenue could collapse and they could lose money for a decade and still not reach bankruptcy. That is far more unique to tech corporations than halving executive’s pay. It is what actually has been protecting Nintendo from their failures. They still exploit and abuse employees just like every other Japanese corporation.



  • Ok, big plot hole here—and what is really troubling me about AI rise up. We have dead internet theory. When everyone is a bot on the internet, then every single human on the internet is isolated, and as we become more isolated we drop the internet. Until finally, the internet is nothing more than an empty hall filled with bots talking to bots and no human inside. Which begs the question, why even bother having it in the first place? as it is plainly dead.

    The problem with this gradual disempowerment is two-fold. If, and it is a big IF, robot and AI take up all of the economy. The example given here is making hammers. Then, when every single labor is substituted with a robot, this will inevitably include the companies that acquire hammers for their human workers. As human workers are replaced, the demand for hammer makers will collapse. Leaving the robotic hammer makers no one to sell their hammers to. Which in turns collapses other markets, etc. Until all of the economy collapses for there are no human beings to acquire the commodities.

    Instead we got robotic and AI companies producing and acquiring products for other robotic AI companies, who in turn have no human customers. Then, what is it all for? Why bother keeping such an economy rolling when nothing of value is created? It is a dead economy, that serves no one and provides no profits for any of the owners.

    Of course, the endgame for the top 1% is the collapse of civilization and the implementation of a post-apocalyptic feudal slavery system. But speaking against that is leftist thinking and that is apparently the worst crime that the technopedo class can imagine.