[-] blackstampede 3 points 6 days ago

Imagine, John Lennon?

15
How to make a company not suck (self.actual_discussion)
submitted 1 month ago by blackstampede to c/[email protected]

I've been thinking about enshitification recently, and I'm also working on a startup with a friend that just received funding. I've been wondering how one might arrange a business such that it won't gradually trend towards shittier products in search of higher profit margins.

Obviously, it would be nice to redesign all of society so that this isn't a thing, but barring that, does anyone have any ideas for setting up a business in such a way that motivations are aligned with producing a good product?

Currently, we're trying to retain as much control as possible, but at some point we may go public, and if we do, I'm not sure how to keep us aimed at accomplishing our goals. We're building a platform that should solve or at least improve the replication crisis in scientific research, and we could lose control to investors that want board seats, or sell to someone like Google.

If we do either, I doubt the company will do what we want it to do in the long term.

Going public is the route that seems less likely to lead to this change in direction, but it seems like it could end in the same place over a long enough timeline.

16
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by blackstampede to c/[email protected]

I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I'm planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively.

I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn't lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I'm not sure how to do that, and I'm kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.

[-] blackstampede 115 points 3 months ago

Other people in the comments are mentioning incentives, low pay, crappy management, etc. I don't want to work, but it's not really about any of this, or it's about all of this a little, sort of.

I want to do good work.

I want to make software that helps people, that does what it's supposed to do, that is fast, non-predatory, and doesn't succumb to endless feature creep or artificially rushed scheduling. Pay me enough to live comfortably, and I'll do this basically on my own. I don't even need all of these things.

I've found that most businesses prioritize between 0-1 of these things.

384
submitted 6 months ago by blackstampede to c/[email protected]
[-] blackstampede 72 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)
[-] blackstampede 83 points 6 months ago

I slashed the inside of my thigh open with a pocket knife once. It must have missed the artery by half an inch, maybe, although I didn't know it at the time. I had, at this point, been hurt so many times that I closed the knife, put down the piece of wood I had been whittling on, and wandered into the house to ask my mom what to do.

She said "oh my God! Your new pants!"

And then we duct taped my leg back together because we didn't have insurance, and we didn't want to sit in the ER waiting room for the rest of the day.

[-] blackstampede 150 points 7 months ago

My girlfriend: "more like cracker barrel"

[-] blackstampede 77 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Scope.

Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like "well that's just one guy." I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.

But you are not wrong. I am wrong.

Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.

Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you're saying there's a chance, right? This is why we don't react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.

We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.

92
submitted 7 months ago by blackstampede to c/[email protected]
54
submitted 8 months ago by blackstampede to c/[email protected]
[-] blackstampede 61 points 8 months ago

My girlfriend has a theory that he's trying to destroy the platform deliberately. I disagreed with her until he renamed it to X lol

22
submitted 8 months ago by blackstampede to c/[email protected]

I'm working on a parsing library for mil-std-1553 messages. It's a fun, minimal project that doesn't currently exist as far as I can tell.

11
Got a big presentation today (self.huntsvillealabama)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by blackstampede to c/[email protected]

Wish me luck ladies and gentlemen

Edit: it went great. Thanks for the good wishes.

[-] blackstampede 53 points 8 months ago

I appreciate your vital contribution to this discussion.

[-] blackstampede 57 points 9 months ago

I hope one day we can move past this kind of bullshit. Who gives a shit if she's doing porn on the side?

[-] blackstampede 68 points 9 months ago

That's painfully stupid and unfunny.

[-] blackstampede 53 points 9 months ago

Why does he have a slash in between C# and C++? Those languages are unrelated except in the philosophical sense.

[-] blackstampede 69 points 9 months ago

The videos were pretty standard sex between her and her husband. Honestly, it'd be cool if they just owned it- respond to gotcha questions at debates etc with a shrug and a "yeah, so?" explain how to tip through the various platforms and then give people links. Seems like reacting as if it's shameful just gives right-wing scolds leverage.

view more: next ›

blackstampede

joined 10 months ago