sonori

@sonori@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helixx wants to bring fast-food economics and Netflix pricing to EVs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not 3d printing the final components makes it even more strange to be farming out final assembly, as the expensive part is the tooling and molds for making components in the first place, but said tooling can make a functionally unlimited number of parts once set up, so it really doesn’t make sense to try and sell it out when you could just fulfill all the orders with one set of molds at a central location, but at that point what are they left with? A kit car built by small shops with a subscription model and a hope that the small shops fall into the sunk cost fallacy instead of realizing their at best nowhere close to earning minimum wage and more likely losing money on net?

  It’s extremely predatory, but I’m not really convinced it’s set up like an MLM though, since I can’t really see much incentive for the assemblers/middlemen to set up a proper downline. Feels more like an attempt at an Uber but for car manufacturering? or at least to make money off of would be entrepreneurs trying to set up a car assembly company.

  Honestly though, mostly it feels like an attempt to grift investors in the standard silicon valley startup way, where you promise the moon to try and get established companies and venture capital to give you free money just in case you make it big, maybe IPO or get bought out completely, and worse case you just get to keep the extravagant salary you pay yourself and your friends for as long as you can keep the grift going.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helixx wants to bring fast-food economics and Netflix pricing to EVs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot of red flags to be skeptical about here, but the first one that stood out to me wasn’t any of the organizational shanagans or attempts to undermine labor, but the emphasis on 3d printing. 3d printing is great for one offs or incredibly complex internal geometry, but is effectively the polar opposite of mass manufacturing and economies of scale, taking hours to produce what can be done with injection molding in seconds at a small fraction of the cost, and it is telling that they are bragging about combining a more expensive and less reliable technology with a less efficient, more carbon intensive, and vastly more complex supply and transport chain as a way bring costs down.

  I get that the whole point is to drum up investment hype using vaguely futuristic technologies while building a company that takes the majority of the profits while farming the risk and costs out onto the franchisee, but surely any serious investor can see through this sort of bullshit worse solutions to non existent problems, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Coming from someone who has done sysadmin work for schools, in practice the problem with filtering tends to come from the federal government requiring you to filter porn or else loose your funding, but doesn’t really provide any more guidance or resources beyond that.

  Given most schools tend to be tight on money, this in practice means generally ticking the box’s in the firewalls config or outsourcing the whole system and the people who control the defaults control the vast majority of schools. No one person is going to try and keep track of and sort the entire internet, so often no one has any idea of what the ever updating list of blocked sites is until someone actually brings it up.

  Personally I think the government should just set up a small board that maintains a repo with a list of sites they want blocked to comply with funding instead of leaving it up to the school, who will tend to be overzealous because there’s minimal to no cost one way and a massive one if it makes the news that you’re not strict enough.

  This list of not safe for work sites could then even be used as the base of the filter for other government buildings too when combined with a data exfill list, and would save everyone a lot of time and effort. Of course it would likely hurt sales for a handful of companies with lobbyists and will never get done, but it would solve this issue.

  All that being said, in the case of many of the schools listed in the article I have no trouble believing it’s malicious. The problem shouldn’t have taken more than a ticket or first talk with a sysadmin to resolve, much less escalated to legal action, and is undoubtly an active choice on the part of the school administrations in question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Robots that know if we’re sad or happy are coming | Biometric Update⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yay, more ways to target ads. Now your website can require users to have an active microphone in order to browse the site because it can help tailor the “experience.” Better yet, just use it to analyze the live feed coming from an Echo or other smart device and sell the analytics to a different company. What could possibly go wrong?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LinkedIn targets users caught between TikTok and what used to be Twitter | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Twitter I can see because Linkin’s whole thing is based around formal communication so adding celebrities and business might work if you really squint, but TikTok? TikTok? A platform built on algorithmic content slurry of low effort with no lasting connection or ties between viewer and creator?

  The fuck are they on and where can I get some.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Florida teens arrested for creating “deepfake” AI nude images of classmates⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Boy creates fake photorealistic porn of a girl and passes it all around school to bully, harass, and encourage them to kill themselves: it’s just like drawing a picture of your date.