• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • The best and brightest in an area for the pay the companies are willing to pay is not the same as the best and brightest (you are adding a lot of constraints). A lot of times those people will be quite average (or mediocre). By definition, most people are average or close to it. If a company is not willing to pay to attract and retain the actual best and brightest (as many will not), they are left with mediocrity. The companies will often still be able to make a lot of money, because companies in general do not need the best and brightest just to avoid failure and bankruptcy.

    Will once innovative companies become worse companies and provide worse services/products? Absolutely. Will they be left behind by better companies who do attract the best and brightest? Sometimes, depending on the industry and the depths of the moats they have built and the number of aligators guarding their monopolies (e.g. regulatory capture and other monopolistic behavior). Will they go bankrupt? Sometimes, but in general it takes more than to just settle into a mediocrity.



  • Do you think every company out there is stacked with the best and brightest? By definition, only a minority of employees can be considered that. Many companies run just fine on mediocrity, it all depends on how they intend to make money. Mediocrity can in many cases be an advantage for a company, if that allows one to set aside any shred of integrity at a shot of accomplishment and praise from executing on the many bullshit and unethical things many corproations bring in cash from.


  • It’s known as a beginner-friendly distro, exactly for the reasons you say. There is nothing wrong with using something like that as an intermediate or advanced user if that is what you prefer. You don’t have to go “Well, I have been using Linux for four years now, guess I am an intermediate user so now I have to switch to Arch”





  • This is what I use. Replaced my old Fitbit Aria 2. I weighed in on both scales for about a month, and it was consistently 0.15 kg below, which is good. The body fat measurement was a bit more off, and it varies almost nothing over long periods of time, but I don’t really trust those measurements anyway.

    I believe you can set up the scale in GadgetBridge as well, but I have not tried to do that.




  • I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.

    Interesting - I don’t use Spotify anymore, but I overheard a conversation on the train yesterday where some teens were complaining about the results being super weird, and they couldn’t recognize themselves in it at all. It seems really strange to me to use LLMs for this purpose, perhaps with the exception of coming up with different ways of formulating the summary sentences so that it feels more unique. Showing the most played songs and artists is not really a difficult analysis task that does not require any machine learning. Unless it does something completely different over the past two years since I got my last one…









  • I deleted my desktop environment during an apt upgrade, not once, but twice. Bad habit of not actually reading the messages that pop up properly - it did ask me if I wanted to delete it all, and I just said “yea lol lfg”. There was some conflict with a third party PPA that caused this.

    Didn’t know that had happened to begin with. I was stuck on the session manager login screen and it just wouldn’t proceed after entering password. First time I just reinstalled Linux, and the second time I found out how to reinstall it from tty. This is how I learned about tty as well.