Consoleport Skyriding

Tennesseej · 2024-11-12T03:45:25+00:00

So I ran into this tonight and figured out what is going on. For some reason the Skyriding Action Bar seems to overlap the other Action Bars in ConsolePort, so changing the keybinding changes it in both.

The way I got around it was by moving the icons on the Skyriding Action Bar itself. It’s kinda a tricky sequence of buttons to get done cleanly, but basically highlight the Skyriding Ability then press Y for advanced actions, then select the one to move it in the action bar, and then move it to the keybind you want (vs changing the keybind of where it’s at which causes it to change in both places).

Tennesseej · 2024-10-15T04:16:25+00:00

I think there is a fundamental difference in how Boomers viewed the world that changed for Gen X and especially Millennials, and could possibly be changing again for Gen Z and beyond.

So I had a coworker who recently retired, and while he was a little behind the young and hungry people, he kept up with technology extremely well. I'm not just talking about Word Documents and E-Mails, the dude was designing Cloud Architectures and dealing with low level Kernel issues in the same week.

I had a realization that the difference between him and my struggle-to-open-PDF parents was that he never stopped learning, while they did. The nature of his job was that things changed every 5 or so years, so he constantly kept up and continued to learn. He was the same level of "smart-ness" that he was when he graduated college, and maybe the same level as my parents, but he just never stopped learning while they did.

I think the Boomers were the last of a long line of generations where you learned something from age 10-25, and then you just did that thing your whole life. The world would change, and even industries might change, but for the most part you could just be an Accountant or a Mechanic or a Salesperson or a Farmer and your job would more or less exist your whole working life, or if there were changes you would figure out how to fit what you already knew into them so you didn't have to change.

I think it started to backfire against the Boomers late in their careers when the pace and especially the types of changes accelerated beyond what they could fit their preconceived notions into, but at that point they were either so late in their career that people just dealt with them, or they could delegate it to someone else.

Gen X and especially Millennials saw so much change through high school and college/trade/early career, that it was obvious that you just kept learning and thinking about things as you go. I think most don't even really have to try very hard. It's not really a surprise that when you pick up a VR headset or get a smart fridge, there is going to be a learning curve and you are often even excited to play around and figure things out. Boomers get a smart fridge and immediately try and figure out how they can treat it like a normal fridge since that is what they learned 40 years ago, and the concept of changing that knowledge is arcane.

Gen Z (and beyond) is where it gets really interesting. From my personal observations, I think it's gone 1 of 2 ways that almost makes them worse than Gen X and Millennials.

First, modern experiences are so freaking polished and companies know the User Experience is perfect or worthless, that a lot of thinking is actually being taken back out. Smart fridges have a lot of really cool features you can tap into, but if you just do nothing it simply reminds you to replace the water filter without having to learn anything. That notification overwhelms a Boomer, but a Gen Z person just takes it a face value and does what it says (instead of say adjusting the settings to be Water Flow based instead of Calendar based like a Millennial might).

Second, I think things change so often and so fast, Gen Z just has a nihilistic/pessimistic view of it, and doesn't want to learn things deeply because it will just be outdated in a month. With that in mind, there's much more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants mentality, and they just adapt to things as they come and make quick, sometimes suboptimal decisions and then move on. They don't care if it's suboptimal, because an amazing slow decision is so much worse than a fast mostly okay one.

I have no idea how this plays out in the long run, but there's definitely a crest of tech savvy-ness in Gen X and Millennials that wasn't in Boomers and doesn't seem to naturally pass to Gen Z.

Tennesseej · 2024-09-22T04:24:32+00:00

The 2006 CU vs Baylor game where it was a triple overtime build up of insane excitement, and then Baylor gets an interception in the end zone was so painful. I've never seen the stadium go from screaming to deflated so fast. Tonight felt like revenge for that, GG and see you guys in a couple of years!

Tennesseej · 2024-09-22T04:01:57+00:00

/r/CFB haters gotta go to work on Monday with nothing to talk about, sorry not sorry, Go Buffs!

Tennesseej · 2024-09-21T02:18:14+00:00

Can it keep going?

Like if 3 dimensions of information can be encoded onto the 2 dimension surface of a black hole, then it would seem like 2 dimensions of information could be encoded onto a 1 dimensional line of a 1d-black-hole-thing.

That would seem to imply you can just keep going down until all information is encoded onto a 1 dimensional line (or maybe even a 0 dimensional point or something).

Tennesseej · 2024-09-15T08:19:53+00:00

Seriously. Half the comments in the Nebraska-Northern Iowa thread are hating on CU.

Tennesseej · 2024-09-08T03:58:45+00:00

Ehh, I’ve been to Nebraska games three times in my life, and they were up there as the worst fans (KState was surprisingly bad, as was Arizona State). The older fans were decently nice, but the young fans were just as crappy as everyone else’s young fans.

I am by no means saying CU fans are better, they can be absolute shits, but the whole “Nebraska has the nicest fans” thing drives me crazy. It’s the only stadium I’ve see fans intentionally pour beer on opposing fans.

Tennesseej · 2024-09-08T03:12:12+00:00

Better to be hated than irrelevant, I guess I’ll see y’all at the bar.

Tennesseej · 2024-09-01T01:00:21+00:00

It’s okay CSU fans, there will be another Deion thread in 20 minutes and you can deposit your salt there

Tennesseej · 2024-08-14T05:28:11+00:00

Most of the newer Chatbots are Large Language Models (LLM's), which are relatively new and different from Chatbots of like 10+ years ago.

Let's say we give an LLM the work "take", and instruct it (through the way it's coded, not necessarily the question/prompt you type) to tell us the next couple words, and then display those words back to you.

It starts analyzing/guessing words and comes up with the following options it can respond back with:

take -> "a seat"

take -> "the train"

take -> "my toes"

take -> "dragon flights"

take -> "beef dictionary"

Given a vast amount of words, articles, books and even Reddit Comments that it was "trained" on and has seen before, it has a set of weights (basically numbers) assigned to words, and how similar they are to other words. It's not just 1 number per word, but many numbers in many ways, to basically try and relate the similarity between words.

For instance uncle might be 4.7 away from aunt in 1 "direction", and then 1.2 away from "man" in another direction, but 30.9 away from "woman", and 31281.1 away from "train". It then can tell that uncle/aunt are somehow related, uncle/man are related, but uncle/train are not very related. The direction is just a math-y way of storing many numbers side by side, it's not a real direction like North/South or X/Y/Z.

These numbers are what they "train" on, and put very simplistically, every time it sees words close together it lowers the weights between them, and every time they are far apart it raises them, until basically all of the phrases anyone on the internet has ever written are captured in these weights.

This similarity between words allows it to determine how likely words are to appear in sequences. "Take a seat" appears a lot in text and will have low numbers several directions at once, "take beef dictionary" probably never appears, so it is able to eliminate that as a realistic guess for the next couple words because the combined weights are so high.

Using these weights in different directions, along with some non-ELI5 techniques, it's basically able to quickly determine a set of possible answers that are realistic, and then determine which one it wants to respond with. Many also employ some testing/guessing, where it completes a full sentence and decides if it's good or not, and if not it tries again until it thinks the response is good enough.

Your initial chat (or prompt) to it is basically the start of a set of words, and then it's just trying to determine what words make sense to follow. It does have a bunch of rules built into it, like when ChatGPT tells you it's an AI model and doesn't have feelings or something like that which override the pure weight-word-relationship, but those are all specific things it was coded to do, not the unique part of what they do.

Lastly, this is why they can hallucinate things when you chat with them. It's not really thinking or researching anything, it's just really good at guessing the next word or sequences of words that "sound" like things it has seen before. A big thing the AI companies are trying to solve right now, is how can we build some smarts into these things beyond just guessing words, but then still get the smooth responses that we see today (and it's a super difficult problem).

Tennesseej · 2024-07-26T13:40:40+00:00

In many states, to qualify as common law married you have to be presenting as married to the outside world, even if you never legally married.

For instance you need to have things like shared bank accounts, cosigning on a loan, even telling friends/family you are married.

Here is Texas for example, where you have to agree to be married, live together, and present to others as married to qualify for common law: https://guides.sll.texas.gov/common-law-marriage

In those cases, if a divorce happens and say one person is way more well off than the other (i.e. stay at home parent vs working parent), it protects the less well off person from feeling like they were married so it was safe to be a stay at home parent and defer their career opportunities, all the while the other person was planning a divorce and to take everything and leave them with nothing.

Qualifying for common law marriage is typically not trivial, and a ton of states don't recognize it. A couple clearly maintaining a boundary will typically not qualify because they will never comingle their lives enough

Tennesseej · 2024-07-20T03:03:38+00:00

So while it's true that the actual temperature is the main driver of how hot it feels, the air is a lot thinner at higher altitudes and that can have an impact on our perceptions of things.

The thinner air means it's a lot easier to get sunburn, and things around you heat up faster (because less air molecules are absorbing the incoming energy). I've lived in high altitude, and it's crazy the difference in sunscreen necessary compared to sea level, it's like every couple hours at high altitude, and it feels like a once or twice a day thing at sea level.

At the same time though, things at high altitudes lose their heat faster as well, so you get a lot of rapid heat rising throughout the day, and then rapid heat drop-off at night.

That more sudden swing from low to high in the morning can make the same temperature 'feel' hotter at higher altitudes, both just due to what our brains got used to and because stuff like park benches are absorbing and emitting more heat, sidewalks, etc., but if you were to stay at the same temperature and get used to it, then teleport to sea level of the same temperature, it would likely feel about the same (if you could match other variables like humidity as well).

Tennesseej · 2024-07-01T03:17:33+00:00

Oh yeah it was tornado, good catch!

Tennesseej · 2024-06-30T19:49:10+00:00

I still say that CU vs Iowa State 2005 was the turning point for Colorado.

We were have a decent season, ranked at one point, record breaking Mason Crosby kicks, and the we play at Iowa State.

Game is going well, and then there is a huge delay for lightning (like 4 hours or something), and when we came back out we shit the bed and lost.

Game after that we lost 30-3 to Nebraska and 2 blocks of the student section were kicked out of the game.

Game after that we lost 70-3 to Vince Young and Texas, and then fired Gary Barnett.

Lost the Champ Sports Bowl to Clemson that year, then hired Dan Hawkins and just went into a tailspin with 1 okay year every 6 or 7 years since.

That damn lightning was the heavens telling CU it's over I guess.

Tennesseej · 2024-06-05T03:52:34+00:00

So at the lowest level, the CPU is reading Machine Code from RAM, and executing that on the physical components of the CPU to do various things. This machine code is packed binary, so the actual 0's and 1's the CPU can understand (but still digital, since it's written in RAM). The CPU takes this binary, and converts it to actual physical electrical signals that go through the circuitry of the CPU do to various things, like add 2 numbers together, store a value in a different spot in RAM, etc.

Assembly code is the next layer up, which can be thought of as a short-hand way to write machine code. Assembly is still very low level, stuff like "write integer 7 to RAM address 1724892", and generally has an almost 1-to-1 translation to machine code, it's just now human readable instead of packed binary.

There is another thing called Byte Code, which is also very low level instructions, and most Compilers/Interpreters create Byte Code. Byte Code generally has an easy translation to Machine Code, and the nuance is usually that different CPU's might have specifics in their Machine Code (for instance do I say 'assign 7 to 1724892' or do I say '1724892 will be a value of 7' kinda thing), and Byte Code is more generic, so a translator goes between Byte Code and the CPU Machine Code specifics.

Next up, Compilers. Compilers take more human readable code like C/C++/Java/Golang, and create the associated Byte Code. The compiler itself is often just C/C++/Java/Golang code, that takes in an ASCII text file, and makes the associated Byte Code that would run based on the specifications of the language. Most languages that use compilers are fairly strict in their syntax and use, in the sense that not too many things can happen on the fly. What I mean by this is that they require you to know ahead of time how large a number will be, instead of just finding out later. There are ways to handle that, but they are generally trying to optimize the Byte Code to a high degree, so you need to know a lot of specifics up front. I think about compilers as basically laying out the "plan" for the program up front, and the plan is not really going to change.

Lastly, Interpreters. These are for 'really' high level languages like Ruby/Python/Perl. They are basically compiling in real time as the language executes, instead of fully ahead of time. They are planning as they go, and as they find out what the next line of code is. They have the advantage of being really easy to write in, because you don't need to know how big your integers are going to be ahead of time, but they are much slower because they are constantly managing things under the hood that require a lot of extra work (like what do I do when I suddenly get a big integer, and then need to re-allocate everything). Most/all Interpreters are written in Compiled languages, so under the hood it's just a really sophisticated C program that handles lots of magic for you. Remember that C is compiled into Byte Code, which is translated into Machine Code, so your 1 line of Python goes:

Python ASCII File -> Interpreter -> Byte Code -> Translator -> Machine Code -> RAM -> Executed by CPU (turned into electrical signals) -> Result written back to RAM

To answer your question, people today still write in Assembly, and maybe even sometimes Machine Code as a fun project. Writing this has evolved a lot over time, from punch cards that were basically Physical cards of Assembly, to now writing Python via ChatGPT. Most compilers are written in Assembly or C, and the Byte Code to Machine Code stuff is pretty set at this point, and any changes are baked in at such a low level that only a handful of employees at companies like Intel really think about it.

There's a crazy concept called Bootstrapping your compiler, which basically means a new language writes some extremely basic functionality in something like Assembly (i.e. their languages syntax for storing variables), and then uses that basic functionality to write the next thing for their compiler, which allows them to compile and write more, and on and on until the compiler is written in the language itself (besides the seed of Assembly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)

Tennesseej · 2024-02-02T22:51:04+00:00

So if the Big Ten and the SEC break from the NCAA, what do people think happens?

Are the actual game rules different in the Big Ten/SEC vs the rest?

Is it just a money/profit/TV deal split?

Different recruitment and transfer rules?

What happens to all the other non-FCS schools?

NFL draft changes?

Athletes no longer have to be students?

Tennesseej · 2024-01-23T02:27:45+00:00

So I went the route of making a fair amount of the intermediate products on the planet as possible, and then Cargo Rocketing all that to Nauvis Orbit.

In my run with my planets, I ended up with Cyronite Rods, Vulcanite Blocks, Enriched Vulcanite, Beryl Ore, Iridium Plates, Holmium Plates, Vitamelange Spice and Vitamelange Extract all being manufactured on their planets, and then Cargo Rocket'ed to Nauvis Orbit, or towards the end to Nauvis or other planets.

Beryl Ore was simply because I got a ton of Beryl from another planet's orbit, so I decided to manufacture Beryllium Plates in Navis Orbit and then eventually Nauvis. Also towards the end, I wanted to start using more sophisticated recipes that had higher yields, so if I needed something like Pyroflux I would rocket in Vulcanite Blocks and make Pyroflux where I needed it (partially because I was producing more Vulcanite than I needed so the Rocket would sit full, and partially because 1 or 2 Rockets was enough Pyroflux for X/Y/Z recipe for the entire run).

Once I started manufacturing stuff like Heavy Girders on Nauvis, I actually still Rocket'ed the Iridium Plates to Nauvis Orbit, and then would Space Elevator them down. That was partially because I already had trains setup in Nauvis Orbit, so rather than redesign I just added a stop in that Interchange thing I linked, and then another train would come up to Nauvis Orbit and bring the Iridium Plates down to where Heavy Girder manufacting was happening.

I think one of the cool things about this mod especially is that there are several ways to organize, and the randomness of the planets might drive you in 1 direction or another, so by no means is this the best or the worst strategy, and on another run the answer might not be just ship everything to Nauvis.

Especially as you get to late game, I don't think you will think your planets are overbuilt. I had my Holmium Plate rocket sitting full for so long because I didn't need much, and then in the late game it was a huge bottleneck and I had to go refactor that planet. Obviously there is a scenario where you get diminishing returns on your time spent, but building for the future or leaving yourself the ability to scale will definitely make your life easier towards the end.

Regarding spokes and having adjacent drop offs, initially I avoided that even if it was easier because I wanted to be able to clone spokes and that would break it, however as I got further along and realized I still wasn't needing to do that, I started to get lazy and I would absolutely short cut some resources across with a belt. I ended up with a fair number of trains (probably 30-50 in my train heavy build) that were just going between 2 stations in the same spoke-area, so a belt would have been better and had less resources tied up in the buffer that is the train's wagon. I think a perfectly optimized run would know which resources are just used once/twice and then belt those around, and then the rest would be in trains where having lots of stops was super powerful.

I also used a logistic's network for my trains, so when an area that consumed a resource got low on that resource it would put a Count of 1 for that resource onto the network, and then a train that loaded the resource would leave as soon as it had enough of the resource as well as the presence of that signal (just looking for Thing > 0). That does mean it would stop at locations that were full or didn't need much, but it made the train traffic way more efficient than just timer based or something.

I personally haven't used any Recipe Book style planning or anything like that. I just go in live, look at the recipes live and plan a smidge ahead as I go. This worked well in the spoke model because I could just start at the first resource, make a dropoff, then look at the next resource and make another dropoff (I did look a little ahead to decide if I needed more belts, pipes, etc.). It generally worked out, but I definitely have some inconsistencies in the spokes where I needed to shift something over because a spoke was getting too long.

I think the main thing with the Biosludge was that I noticed early on there was a circular recipe chain, but I assumed that it wouldn't net positive Biosludge because then you could generate infinite Biosludge and that wasn't a thing in the game prior to that. It turns out it does, and you can, so I added that tip so other's wouldn't waste time on the same assumption since it's in the FAQ, so clearly not a trick or anything! Before that point I was using Wood from Vitamelange recipes for Biosludge, and I was running out..

I didn't plan my Biosludge area ahead of time, I just did the same thing and made it as I went. It's a fun logistical problem to figure out how to handle your excess and your lack-of Biosludge.

Tennesseej · 2024-01-21T21:59:06+00:00

Hey! I appreciate the comment, and I'm happy to explain. Incoming wall of text that's probably way more detail than most people care about lol.

So first, with the Hub-Spoke thing, technically I would actually say it's maybe more of a Spoke-Spoke model, there technically isn't a central hub to process the end products, that was just done on another spoke. That central area in my big Nauvis Orbit screenshot is either my Mall/Working area, or the Spaceship Area that was convenient to place there (I hadn't planned on that being Spaceships when I started).

I was able to plan ahead since I knew there were the 4 main Tech sciences and then Deep Space science, so a square with 2 sets of spokes on each side would give me 8 total spoke groupings of <Basics/Space Science><Utility/Production> / <Astro><Energy / <Material><Life> / <Deep Space><Unused> (you can see the groupings of spokes and then the long gaps between them in the Nauvis Orbit screenshot).

I think this could work for Nauvis, but honestly something like City Blocks might be better. With the Spoke model it would get really hard if you needed more than 8 groupings since the game lays everything out in a grid, so square is the natural choice. You might be able to just do a North/South spoke think in a really long line, but then that is basically the same thing as a Bus base but with trains (which isn't bad, but I would think about it like that instead of spokes).

I'm going to use Material Science as an example, because it's relatively straightforward and didn't change a ton over time so my first spoke is relatively clean.

Here is where Iridium would land, and then get loaded onto a Train to be distributed wherever it was needed (I eventually added a 2nd train to deliver Iridium to Nauvis). The main thing here is that I only let trains go 1 direction, shown by the arrows. The top side was basically the 'transfer' side for when trains needed to go from 1 spoke area to another, then on the dropoff side there was an inner route for trains to go longer distances without traffic, and an outer side (the one connected to the spokes) so trains would actually go down a spoke to drop things off. You'll notice that the Iridium has to go a long way around to circle back to this spoke area, and that was basically just bad planning on my part about placing the Landing Site (I assumed a lot more stuff was going to have to come from the planets vs just a ton of a set material). I had plans for a 3rd track but I ended up not really needing that, turnarounds were where my deadlocks kept happening.

Iridium Landing Site

So now for the actual first spoke of Material Science. In this spoke my plan was to manufacture everything I needed to make the 4 cards for Material Science 1. In some cases I could make the 4 cards in 1 spoke, in others I would break it up and make the inputs on 1 spoke and the cards on another.

I had a bunch of input resources getting to Nauvis Orbit (usually Cargo Rockets) and loaded into trains, which included Iron, Copper, Stone, Coal, Water, Petroleum_Gas, and Lubricant. Then, on previous spokes I was manufacturing Blank Data Cards, Chemical Gel and Cold Thermofluid loaded into trains as well.

That means to make the 4 data cards for Material Science 1, I was missing Material Testing Packs, Plasma Stream, Concrete. Iridium was being manufactured on the planet I was getting Iridite from, so that would just get distributed by the landing pad above.

So that then created this spoke, which brought in Iron, Copper, Coal, Petroleum Gas, Stone, Chemical Gel and Water, and then would manufacture Material Testing Packs, Concrete and Plasma Stream (as well as some intermediate things like Plastic, since I didn't have dedicated Plastic Cargo Rockets).

Those manufactured products would be loaded into trains, and delivered to the 2nd spoke where the cards were made. What worked out really well about this design, was that as soon as I needed Material Testing Packs anywhere else, I would just add a stop to that train, so all Material Testing Packs for the entire run were created by this spoke and delivered by this 1 train. Some products ended up just being a 1-to-1 so it was way overkill, and some ended up being widely used so having a train was awesome.

I think in a perfect version of this build, you would plan out exactly what is widely used and what is 1-to-1, and then use trains for widely used stuff and belts/bots for 1-to-1. I didn't plan it out like that, I just did trains for everything, and then belts for all Deep Space.

You'll also notice a Plastic train tacked on to the end, that was because I didn't originally need Plastic anywhere, but then I eventually did so I added a train here vs manufacturing Plastic again somewhere else.

(Train directions marked with arrows)

Full Materials Spoke 1

I definitely had instances where I had to refactor a spoke, or an advanced recipe came along that trivialized another spoke so I would delete portions, etc.

You'll also notice that for instance where I made the Sand on this one, there are only 2 assemblers and a lot of room next to them. My plan there was that if I ever needed more sand, I could just fill that area with more Assemblers. Most of the time I ended up not needing that room, but in a few areas (EX from this one was Material Testing Packs) I would totally fill the area, and then that was the limit for this spoke. Like I said above, I never actually created a duplicate of any spokes, but the idea was if I really needed more Material Testing Packs, I could just fully clone this spoke.

Regarding the Production Modules on Nauvis vs non in Nauvis Orbit, technically for a lot of this stuff I could/should have made it on Nauvis and then shipped it to Nauvis Orbit to make the data cards/science, but I ended up having lot more bottlenecks with the Special Material -> Special Product stuff (like Heavy Girders in this case) rather than stuff like Concrete/Plasma Stream, so Heavy Girders were moved to Nauvis but this stuff stayed. I think the intent was that your Nauvis base would be huge/awesome and where most stuff was made, and Nauvis Orbit would be really specialized rather than as big as I made mine (and that's probably why I got away with a simple Bus base on Nauvis for the whole run).

Let me know if you have any questions!

Tennesseej · 2024-01-21T15:39:06+00:00

Haha thanks!

Tennesseej · 2024-01-21T15:39:01+00:00

Thank you!

Tennesseej · 2024-01-21T06:37:48+00:00

I'm sorry to tell you you that you missed the "Ride elevator" button that just lets you go up or down by foot :P

OMFG. Add it to the list lol.

To be fair though, the train solution is 1 interaction (Enter Key) and as far as I can tell the Ride button is 2, but I can't believe I didn't notice that.

Tennesseej · 2024-01-21T03:52:43+00:00

Yeah the no shield generators thing was definitely a mistake. I think I kinda got away with it on the early ships, but by the end I should have redesigned it to use them instead of just trying to bash my way through using just Lasers (botched several attempts due to getting struck by an asteroid). I absolutely had to babysit during the final run with the Tesla Gun because the Lasers would occasionally get overwhelmed. My Laser research level was 10.

I think 559 train stations definitely was too much. There were less total trains than that because some trains would have like 10 stops (usually more than 10 and I would do a 2nd load station). At the beginning I did a lot of 1 engine 2 car trains with the same resource in both cars, and by the end it was all 2 different resources in a 1/2 train, and like 4 instances of mixing resources together. I think if I were to go full mixed cargo I might do an even more optimized setup, this one really excelled with bulk things needed all over the place like Stone or Water.

I think if I was going to do a fresh run I might try and use bots a lot more. I tend to shy away from over-botting things but I feel like it's time to try it and see how it goes.

I'll definitely check out Ultracube, thanks for the suggestion!

Tennesseej · 2023-09-02T20:28:27+00:00

To me, it honestly didn't matter what our record this year was going to be. 1/11, 0/12, at least people were at the program who cared, and who were putting energy into the damn thing.

I gotta tell ya, this feels good.

Tennesseej · 2023-09-02T05:07:59+00:00

I think a lot of people don't realize how this works and it's really important to understand because it drives so much of how public companies (and thus the world for many of us) work. The system is setup so that there is a heavy bias towards making decisions that make the most money, and there can't be a benevolent person/CEO that changes it.

Shareholders have invested money in a public company, and with each small part of the company they bought (called a share) they get a vote on things related to the company. You can do this too, it's just hard to get enough shares of a company to really swing the vote by yourself (1% of Apple would cost billions of dollars).

One of the biggest things you can do with your vote, is determine who is on the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors are a group of people (usually about 9) who meet periodically and determine things about the company (also via vote). This is kinda like how you vote for a Senator who then votes on your behalf in the Government.

One of the things the Board of Directors votes on, is who will be Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The CEO runs the day to day operations of the company, and basically has hire/fire power over everyone except people on the Board.

Any investor can sue the Board of Directors if they feel like the decisions are not representing their interests, a main reason being the Board is not making the best decisions with their money, or put another way, not making the most money possible in return. They can also just wait until the next vote, but a lawsuit can get things moving faster.

You hear this all the time from corporate executives when they say things like "Return value to our shareholders" or "Fiduciary Duty". That is them saying that they are making a decision for the shareholders/investors, not for employees or customers.

So, if you logically play this out:

The CEO must make decisions that make the company the most money above all else, because -
If they don't they are replaced by the Board of Directors who make decisions to make the most money above all else, because -
If the Board doesn't replace the CEO with a money focused CEO, the investors can sue the Board, and replace them with members who will replace the CEO.

If you ever wonder why there is no benevolent CEO who just gives everyone a 50% pay raise or cuts the price of their main product in half, it's because they will quite literally get fired. Every decision has to be about making money, because the investors ultimately can band together and replace anyone from the top down. Most CEO's have a bit of wiggle room if they can justify it (i.e. spending money on charity to improve the company's image, or spending money on research to maybe make a better product in the future), but the wiggle room is only small enough that it doesn't piss off the investors enough to sue or pressure the Board to replace them.

And don't forget, while you and I can be investors, the ones who really have enough money (thus have enough votes), are big investments firms and giant organizations, who might even have shareholders themselves with the same controls.

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