circuitfarmer

Ich auch

Yeah fair enough. I probably should have qualified it more.

Old Man Trump doing old man things.

It will be largely dependent on your industry. But I do have a couple general comments:

1. If you’re coming from academia, you almost certainly value your degree more than an employer will, at least at first. Certainly, some industry positions will require a Masters and some may even be PhD preferred. But this is going to be an extreme minority of positions, such that there are far more people with MAs and PhDs than positions (same problem as professorships in academia). You will almost certainly need to cast a wider net than you might feel is appropriate.

2. Getting a foot in the door is almost always more important than finding the perfect role early on. Plan to iteravely improve your positions and “fall up.” Just as lecturing or adjunct positions are a reality of academia, job hopping is increasingly a part of industry life. If you do it right (try and stay in positions around 2 years, then start looking at other options) you’ll get a significant raise every time you hop – typically way more than you would get staying put. The perfect role may come, but it won’t be your first. Probably not your second either, so focus on building industry experience rather than one specific job.

3. Since you’ll need to cast a wider net, you may be applying for roles which do not require postgrad stuff. It will be necessary to show transferrable skills rather than relying on academic experience or accolades. I’ve felt that my academic experience has been helpful everywhere, but people don’t tend to get hired for that alone for most positions. It is imperative that you are able to show your worth in a way that is not pointing at a piece of paper. From a hiring standpoint, if it is between you with degree(s) and another applicant who may have far less academically but showed the skills, the employer will pick the other person most times, because they likely suspect you want more money on the basis of having the degrees.

Just a few things that come to mind. But of course, once you get those first couple roles under your belt, it’s a different story. “This person has years of good experience and results AND they have a PhD?” That’s when you start looking for the perfect role.

And especially for #2: job hopping is infinitely easier if you can land remote roles. I have been lucky enough to have been in remote roles for nearly 10 years. The same logic applies: show your worth. And, take that remote contract to start. The need to build experience is annoying, but it is a necessity, and if you’re coming from academia, it’s one thing for which you are automatically behind the curve.

I played the game for a long time. Then I went to industry and never looked back.

I totally, totally get people who stay in academia. I’ve had and in a way still have the dream. But: the struggle is just as bad if not worse than industry, while the money in industry is much, much better.

The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.

I agree with all this, but I think it is all to say: ISPs support Net Neutrality when it behooves them.

At this point I could give up a lot in terms of budget. Give me text without audio all day long if the writing is good. I think we’ve lost our way on RPGs.

The right has tried to censor video games for years.

I’m old enough to remember Doom being blamed for Columbine.

Shareholders demand ever increasing return. There is only one way any of this goes, and we are witnessing a total systematic collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.

You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.

What a cop-out.

Bethesda didn’t have trouble making games when they cared about making games. Now, they care about making money. Yes, devs should get paid for their work. But design decisions based on anything other than making a good game poison the well.

This is why small devs are absolutely killing it with indie games on PC at the moment. AAA titles fail over and over again, because they’re designed for C-suite pockets first and gamers second.

It’s certainly possible. I do get ads that don’t seem relevant for me pretty regularly. But this last time I’m referencing: one of the first ads I saw that night was for our discussion topic.

I’m not disagreeing with you, so I’ll just mention it’s safe to say: whether it is digital fingerprinting or mic listening, the surveillance level is absolutely off the charts.

They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.

I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.

It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.

This is one effect of a general lack of real consequences for corporations and those that run them.

The company has already determined their likely fine after being caught doing something egregious. The profit from being early to market is significant, and so long as it is considerably higher than the likely fine, they go for it. The expected real earnings are the difference between the profit and the fine. It’s all made worse since so often the fine is absolutely nothing compared to the profit, since the numbers these companies are dealing with are so damn big.

This is why you won’t see real change until we stop slapping corporations with fines and start slapping executives with jail time. That is literally the only way to break the cycle.

And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.

In conclusion, the results support the hypothesis that fecal knives are usually shitty knives

– the paper, probably

Good thing he gutted Twitter’s content moderation teams in the name of “free speech”, eh?

If I had a dollar for every time a billionaire loses more money than I could ever dream of because their hubris got in the way or they misunderstood a concept or were just plain dumb – well, I guess I’d be a billionaire too.

I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.

For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.

At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.

Unfortunately, physical media for gaming died when always-online DRM was normalized. It doesn’t matter if you have a game on a disc when you have to phone home every time to use it. The corporation may still block your access.

One more step in ensuring no one owns anything. Lease or rent are your options.

Got the update the other day. Immediately disabled Assistant in settings.

There will be no new features worth using, especially considering privacy concerns, until this AI craze blows over, and ultimately that’s a long way away since so many executives have more $$$ in their eyes than ever.

My main worry is how long it will take before even disabling such features on one’s own device is impossible (and yes, I’m aware that there is already only so much you can do).