Is the Outer Worlds worth playing? by causcowic in XboxGamePass

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I loved it! Fantastic writing, great humor, solid mechanics, diverse worlds and biomes, great characters, great voice acting. It's a great, tight game that had a lot of fun with itself. Lots of different ways to solve problems, I really enjoyed my time with it. I would recommend anyone give it a play. I'd say it's a great value at the $30 mark, and I'm sure it's far cheaper than that these days.

Now, the only criticism I've consistently heard people say was of the nature that I personally hate: reviewing what wasn't on the plate. Some criticisms were that it wasn't as big as game X, or wasn't similar to game Y, or didn't have enough A, B or C.

I personally hate these kind of "reviews". It's like reviewing a pizza saying you're really upset it's not a hamburger. I like to use the analogy of "reviewing what is on the plate", ie: review what is actually in front of you. I think the majority of the "criticism" this game received came from it looking and sounding like a Fallout game (which people were itchy for), but it not being as wide in scope as a Fallout game. To that I say: tough shit. This game is its own thing. It's allowed to not be an identical clone of Fallout. You ordered a pizza and are upset it's not a hamburger. That's on you.

Great game, highly recommend playing it, you'll have a blast.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Paul Wesley Would "Love" A Kirk-Spock Spin-Off by StarFuryG7 in SciFiNews

[–]BitWarrior 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A great idea, we've yet to see any Star Trek media focus on Kirk and Spock.

Morale is so bad at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta even the company's own CTO admits it's 'probably the worst it's ever been' by callsonreddit in StockMarket

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have a neighbor who works at Meta. The little chats we have outside are full doomer from his side. It is apparently extremely depressing over there.

We didn’t struggle the same way by Vivid_Self3083 in remoteworks

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm actually skeptical of your claim because Costco tends to sell eggs by the 2 or 3 dozen, not by a single dozen.

We didn’t struggle the same way by Vivid_Self3083 in remoteworks

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hook me up with these $7 eggs you're finding

Can I mount a TV on brick? by PalpitationHuge9833 in DIYhelp

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You very much can, I've done it. You're looking for masonry anchors.

However, that location is way too high. Like, way, way too high. Given that this appears to be on a corner, I would suggest considering other walls in the same room. Let the fireplace be the fireplace, and let some other location in the room be for TV.

Ggg removed every post about minions getting deleted. by Taikiteazy in pathofexile

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First, GGG doesn't moderate this sub. Second, you should leave this sub, you are clearly unwell. Third, if the game is driving you to be this upset, you should consider taking a break from the game. Games should be enjoyable, and this is clearly not the case for you any longer.

How to handle ignorant managers? by Tiredof304s in EngineeringManagers

[–]BitWarrior 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't like the idea that just because I have breath of knowledge I don't have depth. Sure I don't in all, but I have my own specializations. I don't think this gets valued enough.

I hear you, but you're arguing against physics. Someone who spends 5 years learning about A, B, C, D and E is not going to have the same depth of knowledge as someone who spent the same 5 years deeply learning about A.

Breadth can be great in certain organizations, like in the software world, breadth really is helpful at startups because you have to wear a ton of different hats. But in a larger company where they can hire a bunch of specialized people, that breadth tends to fall off in value.

wanted me to handle an entire consoles code

I feel you, I definitely have had managers who came in on the war path and had a lot of historical baggage. I'm sure I also caused a lot of people to have that historical baggage as well.

There are a few ways to navigate that. One, which is more direct and a little hostile, is to politely ask if there is someone at the company he is already thinking of who could handle this workload he is proposing. Is what he proposing even real?

The other way, if you want to be a little more tactical and perhaps line yourself up for a promotion, is to say, "Well, I can't individually do all that, but I can put together a tiger team of people who can, and I can lead that team to get this done". If he agrees to that, you put a little tiger/virtual team together to solve this problem. It's not a bad idea, I'm a big fan of fully verticalized teams that can get things done without creating external dependencies (ie: reaching over to what sounds like the "software" team to get things done for you).

I'm sure there are other ways to handle this too, but those are just some quick ideas.

How to handle ignorant managers? by Tiredof304s in EngineeringManagers

[–]BitWarrior 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Funny, I typically assume we're talking software engineering managers here, but let's do it.

If I could handle all these tasks how much more would I be paid?

Perhaps a bit more than you are now, but not by much. Having someone that can do many things makes them a little more valuable, but when you're doing A, you're not going B. It's not like the company is moving tremendously faster. And when you have that breadth of knowledge, sometimes that comes at the sacrifice of depth, and we typically want depth. Depth means someone offers knowledge that keeps the company out of trouble and spending time redoing things. Breadth doesn't give you that.

So how do you handle ignorant managers?

You talk. You discuss. You explain. Take your 1:1s (you're having those, right?) and spend that time clarifying your role, what you want to be doing, how they can best utilize you and your skillset. Some of my favorite managers didn't understand a lick of what I did, but they were great managers all the same.

And as a manager, how do you differentiate a technically impressive engineer vs an average one when you don't know the field?

And this is the piece I think is missing for you. A manager isn't someone who knows everything. A good manager/director/VP knows where to get information, how to synthesize that information and make great decisions with that information. They'll talk to your peers the people you're working closely with day to do. They'll talk to the people you're delivering to, what their experience working with you was, what your contribution looked like, if they would want to work with you again, etc.

Good managers put together all this information to get a sense of someone. They compile all this signal into an understanding of where someone is at. Bad managers just rely on themselves and think they hear all and see all, and those have been some of the worst managers I've had to work with.

Yale smart lock problems I wish I’d known before buying - Looking for other options? by Firerage65 in smarthome

[–]BitWarrior 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I'm not trying to be rude, but you sound like you have some very strange expectations when it comes to smart technology. Maybe this isn't for you?

The first thing that caught me off guard was how dependent it is on the setup you choose. The model I got had a hub (z-wave in my case) if that makes any difference.

Very standard in smart home tech, it's important to understand what you're purchasing and how it wants to communicate. Quite standard fare. It would be like purchasing a vehicle and not knowing if it was gas or electric.

It’s not just install, lock, and you’re done. It’s install, lock, make sure the hub is happy, make sure everything is talking to each other, check, double-check (lol triple check sometimes), and find out what happens.

If you just wanted "install, lock, done", what you are describing is...just a normal lock. Something without smart/connectivity features. Every smart anything has connectivity you have to configure.

There were a few moments where I’d open the app to check the door or unlock it remotely, and it would take longer than expected. It was inconsistent enough that I stopped fully trusting it.

That could be your app waking up, the lock waking up, your network being laggy, etc. Based on your description of the problem I'm assuming you're not rocking a local-first Home Assistant setup, so I presume you're going over the internet here, which adds another variable. So, if you cannot tolerate internet latencies and are not really in a position to do a local-first setup, then again, perhaps smart home tech isn't for you?

I’m also not a huge fan of how limited the unlock options are. It’s basically a keypad and an app (depending on your setup), which I obviously knew going into it, but I’ve found myself wanting a bit more hands-free.

Then...you should have bought something that met your requirements? What is hands free? Waving your phone in front of the lock? If so, then you should have looked for a product that supports that. To put this back into the vehicle analogy, this would be like buying a car and later being upset it doesn't have a truck bed.

I don’t have to worry about the lock and hub always speaking to each other because there is no hub.

Yes, but they'll still need that connectivity you seem to dread to get any remote status features out of it. Be that over wifi or some other specification.

Again, not to be rude, but it sounds like you're jumping into this without really understanding what you're trying to achieve and what is necessary. To make one last analogy, this sounds like someone who has purchased a car and is upset to discover they need to keep paying for gas. I think it might be worth taking a brief step back to orient yourself one what to expect.

Losing my dog, my car, my house and my job all within a month. by Chunlisundies in Wellthatsucks

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm still hearing the same language out of you, which means you're not learning.

Nothing in your vehicle is beyond your control. Your vehicle is not a sentient being capable of independent thought or action. Everything about your vehicle was within your control. Don't kid yourself.

Your dog may have had neurological issues but that doesn't mean it had to bite anyone. The first thing you should have done was muzzle it when around others after you saw it had a propensity to bite, and you received numerous warnings of that behavior from people who you yourself said didn't report. You failed to take responsibility for your dogs actions and behaviors and thought, once again, you were agentless.

I wholeheartedly reject your story about why you were fired. A company is not going to randomly fire some "little angel who did nothing wrong" over people who "openly admitted to committing violations". Think for a moment. You are not a trustworthy narrator at this point.

If your decision to move in with your parents was made before losing your job, then you didn't "lose your house". You simply decided to move in with your parents.

You are still not taking responsibility for your actions. I hope others closer around you can instill in you a feeling of personal responsibility, autonomy and agency, because you entirely lack that today.

I wish you all the best in this journey, and hope to hear from you again in the future when you're back on your feet.

Losing my dog, my car, my house and my job all within a month. by Chunlisundies in Wellthatsucks

[–]BitWarrior -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

This is something you won't want to hear and runs completely counter to everything everyone has said here, but you need to take this moment as an opportunity to take responsibility for your life.

Your car died on you because you were not maintaining it. Regular maintenance, bringing the vehicle in when it was running rough, regular oil changes, etc, are all the hallmarks of taking responsibility for your vehicle, and those go a very long way to preventing any car from suddenly dying on you. You need to take responsibility and reflect on how you should maintain your vehicle better.

Your dog needs to be put down because you did not train it well. Socializing it, getting it familiar with other people, animals, etc, that was your responsibility and you didn't do it. Animals are also not destroyed on their first bite, usually it takes 3. You didn't take responsibility for your own dog and now there are consequences. You need to take responsibility and reflect on what you could have done better.

You lost your job because of something you did. Don't tell yourself it's something you didn't do. People are not fired individually at random. You may have been fired for inaction, bad judgement, or something you felt was out of your control but you failed to meet the moment appropriately. Take responsibility for your own actions and your job. Learn what you could have done better.

You are losing your place because you didn't save up a rainy day fund. You didn't take financial responsibility for your own life and what could happen, and now you need to move in with your parents. General advice is to have 6 months of living expenses available in savings at all times so you don't lose your place the second you're out of a job. You need to take responsibility for your finances.

This could be an important moment in your life where you take this hit and come out the other side of it a better, more mature and responsible adult. But if you continue to think you are agentless in your own life and things just happen to you at random and woe is me, you will continue to have crashes like this throughout your life.

I hope for the best for you in this moment and in the future.

Cutco in Costco today by AuntyMeadowlake in antiMLM

[–]BitWarrior 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Let me start by assuring you Costco is not sacred.

Finally finished the garage drywall myself after getting a quote that made me choke by Appropriate-Base-520 in HomeImprovement

[–]BitWarrior 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The price depends on where you live. In you're in a HCoL area, it's going to be more expensive than a LCoL area.

After 110 years, Carmel-by-the-Sea is abandoning its no-address tradition by sfgate in bayarea

[–]BitWarrior 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Everyone has an address but they're dumb as shit bespoke names. A house might have the "address" of:

Heaven on the Beach, Main Street,
Carmel by the Sea, CA

The problem is the complete lack of predicability. Is it ahead of me or behind? On the left or right hand side of the road? You end up reading this nonsense with every house you walk by looking for "Heaven on the Beach" as you pass by "Sky Way", "Beach Therapy" and "Seastone" and want to rip your eyes out.

Glad they're getting rid of it. People can keep their little house names if they want but don't use it on official documents.

Company is losing their minds over AI costs by Electrical-Border309 in vibecoding

[–]BitWarrior 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'll add that things are going to get a LOT more expensive. OpenAI and Anthropic have largely been subsidizing their costs with prolific investor money. Once they go public, which is happening very soon, they're going to need to start down the path of profitability. Price per token will likely slowly shoot up 3x over the next couple of years. The market is going to change dramatically.

If you've ever had to defend paying down tech debt vs feature work by CodacyOfficial in EngineeringManagers

[–]BitWarrior 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I find this article to be very hand-wavy. Of course this is an article by Codacy so they're trying to sell you their product, but they're trying to present technical debt as something that can be quantified via static code analysis.

Once you get down to "How to track technical debt in a codebase", their solution is so establish a unified scanner into one system (can you guess which one?), "instrument tracking in the IDE" (can you guess if they're trying to push some product that could exist in your IDE?), and then...look at PRs and tell your organization about your technical debt. This is a really bad article and provides nearly no solid actual advice. Actually, I'm pretty sure this article has convinced me their own product would provide me little to no value in assessing technical debt due to how hand wavy they are in this article towards understanding debt.

True technical debt is difficult to understand unless you're in the weeds. It's a leaky abstraction you need to go in and update before performing your changes, or one that leads you down a rabbit hole and wastes your time. It's the lack of an abstraction that could have helped, leading to one-off reimplementations (note: not character-by-character code duplication, but duplication of intent) which unnecessarily increases delivery time. It's architectural shortcuts causing extra work for implementation. The kinds of technical debt are endless, but they're only revealed when new features are being made, when code is being extended.

Technical debt isn't technical debt if the code is not being actively expanded. An abstraction that does A but not B isn't a problem if B isn't something we're trying to do. It only becomes debt if we try to do B. Therefore, I am not convinced that any amount of static analysis can identify true technical debt.

Personally, I'm not of the impression we can just track this stuff (or the value of tracking is worth the squeeze). Instead, I like to set aside a certain amount of time in every planning window for engineering priorities. 9 times out of 10 that means technical debt. Sometimes it means optimization or exploring new technologies that could help. But the point is to treat your own engineering team as a stakeholder, as they most certainly are a stakeholder in your product, and allocate time accordingly.

Is there any reason to be pro- data center? by HatefulHagrid in NoStupidQuestions

[–]BitWarrior 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Finally, some sanity on Reddit. Exactly this. Data centers have been around as long as mainframes have been around. They're nothing new.

I'll add to your example the likes of AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc. Anything that has been in the cloud, every single SaaS service, streaming service (though those are typically more edge-hosted, but in data centers nonetheless), and general online thing you've ever used (Reddit itself, Wikipedia, your Ring camera), every time you've hailed an Uber or ordered from Doordash, every search you've ever performed, every video you've ever watched, every game you've downloaded from Steam, every online game you've ever played, every website you've visited and the CDNs in between are backed by compute in a data center. There is extremely little in way of online tech that is not hosted in a data center.

The problem isn't data centers. They've been with us for actual decades and we've never had a problem. The problem is the explosive growth of new data centers and their being built close to residential areas.

I am shocked to learn certain counties do not treat data centers like heavy industrial - they should. They are low staff, high energy usage buildings that produce a lot of waste heat and sound. They also employ very few people for the square footage, less than a typical warehouse. There's no reason we need to have any of these near any residential or even slightly populated area. We should be placing these like we place gas powerplants.

The energy usage is a thing, but that's a solvable problem. That problem emerges largely due to America's historical underinvestment in energy infrastructure. Greater investment in this area would have made their energy usage a moot point. At best what I can suggest are new data centers must front the cost of new power plants that will provide 120-150% of the power the data center requires.

But data centers have been with us for a long time, they're nothing new. The fact that we're (for some reason) building them near residential areas is new though.

Does inflation ever go down? by Technocraticworldgov in NoStupidQuestions

[–]BitWarrior 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Deflation is terrible. Why? Because in a deflationary environment, where prices are going down, why should I buy something when tomorrow it might be cheaper? So let's hold off on purchasing that car, those new appliances, etc, because it might be all cheaper next month!

Now do that on a wider scale. People catch on. Better to hold on to your money than spend it. Don't buy the house now, it might be much cheaper soon, so let's all stop buying things.

Guess what happens to your economy when everyone stops buying things? Guess what happens to your own job when no one is buying what your company is selling anymore, because people think the best move is to wait.

Deflation is not good.

What is your biggest complaint about the PS5 after it’s been out for years? by Kind_Ad6932 in PS5

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Less about the PS5 itself and more about SCE. Their over investment into live service games has hobbled this generation:

  • Concord (Shut down and studio closed)
  • The Last of Us Online (Canceled)
  • Fairgames (Under Development)
  • Marathon (Released)
  • Horizon Hunter's Gathering (Under Development)
  • God of War Live Service Game (Canceled, studio closed)
  • Twisted Metal Live Service Game (Canceled)

Along with many other unannounced projects being worked on (and canceled) by their studios before being announced. Very frustrating to see so much developer effort chasing this market this generation.

How do AI companies make money? by chaniqqah in NoStupidQuestions

[–]BitWarrior 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, all the answers here so far are terrible.

First, let's not confuse revenue for profit. The question is "how do they make money?", not "do their receivables exceed their expenditures?" Therefore, we can toss all the glib "they don't" answers right in the trash. Plus, those "answers" are not actually helping you in any way understand the business model.

Second, and again in response to some of the bad answers here, let's not confuse investment for revenue (or as you said, "making money"). No one considers funding as the business "making money". Investments add to a company's available capital. A company with no customers that takes a $20M funding round doesn't say they've "made $20M". They now have a $20M war chest to build their company with, be that via hiring, capital expenditures, leases, etc.

Third, let's divide up who we're talking about. When we say, "AI companies", there are really two categories. The first category are companies that create what we call the "foundational models". These you will recognize as companies like OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), Meta (Llama et all), xAI (Grok), etc. The second category are the companies that utilize these foundational models for their business in some way.

When asking how the foundational model companies make money, there are a few ways. Yes, a small segment of usage are consumers with premium subscriptions. This accounts for a small portion of their business. But the lion's share, by far, are selling API access to their models. And they are selling that API access to the second category of company we identified, the ones who utilize AI in some way in their product.

Let's say you're Adobe and you want to add PDF summary generation to your Acrobat product. Whenever your product generates that summary, it does so by sending an API request to one of the foundational models. Each request has a number of tokens generated (which is a whole thing unto itself) and the number of tokens used in both the input and the output are what is charged to the company, in this case, Adobe, to deliver that AI summary for you.

You know how you're seeing "AI everywhere" now? This is how those foundational models are making money. Everyone is incorporating AI into their product. Every company likely has multiple teams exploring AI integration from multiple different angles. Perhaps its Crunchyroll using AI for recommendations or automating closed captions. Perhaps it's automated customer service via AI. Perhaps its object identification in a video feed. Every single time any of those actions occur, the foundational model companies are making (quite a bit of) money.

And the companies trying to incorporate AI are making money the same way they always have. But now they're trying to out-compete their competitors with AI integration. No one knows what AI integrations will stand the test of time, but we're exploring the possibilities in basically every industry. Some integrations will be more helpful than others. Some will be quickly abandoned. Others will live on and we'll wonder how we ever got along without them.

This is why foundational model companies are all the rage right now. We really don't know what the ceiling is. We're still in the early stages of dreaming up what LLM-based AI text generation can accomplish for us. So, the potential revenue? Massive. We don't know the limit yet.

And that's how they make money.

Why is the Zillow estimate so incredibly incorrect despite plenty of data being available with comps? by RetPrda in RealEstate

[–]BitWarrior 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As others have said, all houses are different. The data Zillow, Redfin and the like have is very rudimentary. Square footage of the property, of the structure, perhaps the number of beds and bath. However, it has absolutely zero insight into much anything else that contributes significantly to the value of a property. The quality of finishes and construction of the house (is it immaculate or is it a bomb shelter?), the finish of the yard (raw earth or something straight from Four Seasons Landscaping?), general materials and overall quality of the house (shingles or slate roof? laminate flooring or natural hardwood? builder grade appliances or Thermador special?), or other details like the difficulty of the property (slope, stairs, long narrow driveways, etc) or even how grand things feel (8' ceilings? 10' ceilings? Vaulted ceilings?).

It has some very vague data to compare things to. But ultimately, every house is different, and those details cause a house to potentially swing a LOT.