this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
120 points (98.4% liked)

Ask Lemmy

31347 readers
1425 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
(page 2) 25 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.

Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago

This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn't mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it's going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It's not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that's easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won't get lost :/ )

Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you'll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn't bother putting any protective packing inside because "it'll be fine if it bounces around a bit".

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can't. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Speaking of Excel, here’s a fun little experiment into the nature of binary numbers and rounding errors.

Start with some number and add a fraction like =A1+(1/3) to it. In the cell below, add that same fraction to the previous one. Copy this formula downwards and watch the numbers grow. After about 50 rows, you’ll have a number that looks like something specific, such as 71, but it isn’t exactly. There’s a sneaky rounding error hidden in there. The actual number is very close to the one displayed, but not exactly what you think it is.

If you’re using IF statements or XLOOKUP with numbers like this, you’ll run into some perplexing errors. If I recall correctly, you can even test the number with =A50=71, which will return TRUE but the xlookup still fails. It’s been a while since I tested this one, but I remember it being really weird in all sorts of unexpected ways. It’s weekend, so I’m not touching my work computer today.

You just need to know that a long series of fractions causes weird binary rounding errors to happen behind the scenes. Adding a series of whole numbers and neat decimal numbers was perfectly ok though.

Also, trying to explain this to some coworkers won’t be worth the effort.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (3 children)

learn.microsoft.com

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and AI generated answers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

That business is just constant problem solving one after another and going through as many to-dos as you can day after day, while still maintaining sanity. That is persistence.

That business is always a house of cards that can fall apart anytime and so you must always keep your eyes on it. That is exhausting worry.

That business is so hard, you'll be tempted to quit everyday. To overcome that urge to quit you'll need a much bigger purpose or mission that drives you. Purpose brings determination.

That business really is about value creation for the entire ecosystem (customers, employees, vendors) and that a business is not above that ecosystem. Wall St & American capitalism is short sighted because it demands you pass lesser and lesser value to that ecosystem quarter after quarter, and that is like a slow axe to your own foot.

That most modern economic theory taught in business schools and used by execs in the biggest companies worldwide is all flawed because it fully relies on capturing and optimizing all sorts of business data, but the truth is that it is impossible to capture real world in data.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The better you get at coding, the less you'll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can't fuck up code that isn't written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it's not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago

I'm in accounting and considering what I read in the news, it was surprising to me how honest it is in real, regular, non public companies. We get real audits that are trying to validate our records, we give them our real work to look at, try so hard to figure out the real cost and revenue each month and year, to allocate things correctly, nobody is pushing for some fake result, only for a clear picture.

Those companies with fraud? A lot of things have to go wrong, and someone has to be really trying hard to defraud, and needs to convince others to go along with that. Most companies hire accounting because they actually want to have a good picture of what's going on financially.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn't mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.

I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.

There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying "what does he know about Columbus anyway?" after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I'm having trouble finding it now.

The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats "massaged the message" with the news media, but watching it you'll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks. (The video I mentioned about Couric and the historian might even be in this film, it's been a while since I've seen it).

Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.

https://mediaburn.org/video/spin/

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How to read well and closely as well as how nonsense academia can be. A recent work I read had multiple minor claims that were not factual while maintaining their main point. It made me realize how it’s hard to have everything right in a work but also how academia and research in general is like a tower of dominos, unless one person questions it the field will continue to build on bs claims.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I am glad Cory Doctorow has come a long way, but man, this was a major gripe from me about him when he was first getting popular in the blogosphere. He made some outright false statements about the history of Napster in the early 2000's, and it made me furious. I remember being like "motherfucker, you lived through this how did you get it so wrong?" He's been a lot more consistent for about a decade or more now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for getting me to look up who that is! I knew his work but not his name.

That’s very frustrating. I wonder if that’s better or worse than in academia? People get called out and theories challenged, maybe a new edition is printed, or books challenging it. In blogs will someone often edit old posts for accuracy like the news does recently?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Oh, that's part of what frustrated me so much about it at the time! I had a friend who had just gotten his Masters whose thesis had been on the co-evolution of control and resistance in digital networks, talking about things like Napster and Bittorrent specifically, and he couldn't find a fucking job as a teacher to save his life. Meanwhile, Doctorow, with all his mistakes, was being asked to teach a class at UCLA.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

That’s a really cool thesis! That must have depressed the hell out of them. I hope they found a good job for them.

Sometimes this sort of occurrence makes me really question the assumed validity of research. People can get away with a lot just because of a credential. I say this as someone in academia not a nut job conspiracy theorist.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In IT the first problem/question should always this:

Is it a people problem or a technology problem?

IT can fix technology problems, managers need to fix people problems

if someone gives an IT person a people problem and they try to fix it, it will probably not go very well

same if you give a manager a technology problem and ask them to fix it

this is the most important lesson that leaders needs to understand

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don't work in a kitchen anymore but the amount of single-use plastic used in chain restaraunts is soul crushing. Most folks have no idea

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I don’t work in a microbiology lab any more, but OMG the amount of plastic waste was unbelievable. Keeping everything sterile (as in germ free and DNA free) does not come cheap! If it’s small and cheap enough, it’s going in the trash. If it’s small but expensive, you’ll autoclave it. If it’s big, you’ll squirt lots of ethanol on it and hope it doesn’t ruin your day.

SpoilerSooner or later it will.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh you think that's bad, don't look at the medical field

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Going through hospice with my parents I saw this first hand even in that brief time, and imagined how it must be going on constantly in every hospital and facility everywhere. And the thing is, it's necessary in most cases because going back to how it was done before would be a nightmare just from the aspect of things being sterile.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don't think there are any particular quirks of logistics that are super hidden.. maybe the most surprising thing for me was the amount of plastic waste? But even then I feel like that wouldn't surprise most people

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I fear that no amount of plastic saving by the general population will even come close to the amount of plastic wasted at the industrial scale.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Real, unfortunately.. like the amount of plastic I recycle at home in a month is probably less than we go through at my warehouse in ~30 minutes.. not even accounting all the plastic in the other stages of shipping.. having worked one step down the line from my current job, we used thrice as much there basically.. and of course the stuff we get at the warehouse is also all wrapped in plastic by the previous guys

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Where does all that stuff go after it's used? I can't imagine it's all recycled properly (let alone reused) but also not really that the bulk is not separated out at such volumes

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

We do separate out plastic, cardboard etc. At my current job but im not sure if it went to recycling or if it was just dumped somewhere with other trash, that's a bit beyond the scope of my work.

The last one we really didn't, so im certain that's all going straight to the landfill

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›