• 0 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • I swear, overcoming fixed functional-ness is like a superpower when you can apply it.

    I once shared a small office with a co-worker. I had the idea to move the desks away from the walls and place them back-to-back, diagonally, in the middle of the room. Other co-workers scoffed and remarked at how dumb and unconventional this looked. Then I explained that we each now had nearly full privacy from each other, much more personal space in our respective corners, no more glare from the window, and nobody could sneak up on us from the door anymore. Things got pretty quiet after that.







  • Company: Provides amenities and services that would (technically) allow a person to live on premises. Pays you enough to retire early if you didn’t have to bother with rent or a mortgage.

    Also company: “We can’t hire you without a permanent residential address.”

    I also worked at multiple places that had fully decked out break-rooms: free food, game consoles, VR, and 60-inch TVs. Everyone was afraid to use them for fear of looking like they were screwing around. Except the interns. They used the hell out of that stuff.


  • I’ve seen this kind of thing too many times to count. First it was in high school, then the workplace.

    1. Person notices there is no explicit rule for a thing, or maybe there’s a loophole somewhere
    2. Does the thing
    3. Annoys someone
    4. Now there’s a rule for the thing


    Some people just want to push the envelope. Other times, people can have a poor grasp of social norms, or they simply don’t respect others. But on the other side of the coin, people get annoyed for good and bad reasons; sometimes, no reason at all.

    Bottom line: it’s a mess, so we get rules. But nobody wants to spend time writing these things and enforcing them, so there’s usually a reason/person/event why they’re there.


  • I’ll preface this by saying this shady shit gets all my hate.

    It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.

    The overall problem here is that human psychology tends to frame this difference as a loss not a gain. Given the choice, people will see the cheaper option as the baseline, and then ask “can I afford to pay more for privacy?” instead of affirming “my privacy is not worth this discount.”

    Also, those of us that have paid for insurance without such a “discount”, are likely keenly aware of the difference. For new drivers, from now to here on out, the lack of past experience presents a new baseline where this awfulness is normalized. Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since the “privacy free” option is still profitable and is enticing for new customers (read: younger, poorer). So it’ll take some kind of law, collective action, or government intervention to make this go away.

    Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record. […] If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.

    I think this is the bigger problem. If someone has the data an insurance company wants, you probably agreed to an EULA or signed something that makes their ownership, and its sale, legal. With the “yeah go ahead and use my data” option on the table, the machinery to do this without your knowledge is already in place. All the insurance provider has to do is buy the data from someone else. When the price is right, 1st party spyware isn’t required at all.


  • Never understood the appeal honestly.

    Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:

    • Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
    • Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
    • The game has a dozen or more such heroes
    • icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
    • at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever


    From this I could deduce:

    • There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
    • Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
    • Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
    • League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
    • Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times


    I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.


  • My favorite was the hostess who didn’t want to clean the bathroom so she would just fill the soap and and paper products and fill a spray bottle with Lysol that she would spray around to give the smell of a clean bathroom.

    This is exactly the kind of BS I’m talking about. I once knew some pool lifeguards that had to rotate through bathroom cleaning duty. I overheard that their MO was to just get everything wet with a hose, splash pinesol on the floor, and call it a day.




  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I’m one of these people. I can smell an apartment roach infestation from the front door, every time.

    And yes, restaurants always get the “sniff check” before we sit down. No-go odors are:

    • bleach
    • pine-sol (amonia)
    • heavy perfume (think “Glade plugin-in”)
    • insects (roaches, etc)
    • pet odor (wet dog, litterbox)
    • sewage (usually a dry floor drain but that’s still not okay)
    • dingy carpet (think: “old movie theater”)

    The first two are obvious attempts at covering up something worse with “clean” smells, and/or the staff has no idea what “clean” actually means. And they obviously don’t care what olfaction means to someone trying to enjoy a meal, which says heaps about what they think food service actually is. Everything else just speaks to the “I don’t care what you smell” part, or there’s something very wrong with how the kitchen is run. /rant

    An example of a top-shelf dining odor experience? I once went to a Japanese restaurant at opening time. The only smell in the dining room was that of the specific kind of imported cedar in the cutting boards. This is traditionally cleaned with boiling hot water, and nothing else. This released a gentle woody and pine-y scent that just filled the space and invited the senses. I came hungry, but I sat down ravenous. The meal to follow was something I will never forget.

    Edit: some clarification since this got some traction. I know that bleach and ammonia are s-tier disinfectants and absolutely necessary for food prep, health standards, and the rest. I use this stuff at home. My issue is with establishments that utterly fail at ventilating these odor and spoil the dining experience with strong chemical odors. Looking deeper I find very strong cleaning odors (long after opening hours) suspicious since it’s very easy to splash stuff around, giving the impression of cleanliness, but not actually clean anything. Strong chemical smells also make it impossible to detect sewage, rot, mold, soil, and other things that would easily flag a restaurant. I’d rather not take the chance.