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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I have no idea how to fix the problem, but I’ve read somewhere that burn (a relatively new machine learning framework in Rust) is capable of loading models like stable diffusion. As Burn is built with webGPU and all the shader transpiler-stuff that comes with it doesn’t that mean that it can also run easily on (even older) AMD cards? I think what’s lacking is equal performance as nvidia drivers are heavily optimized already.

    Maybe someone knows more here?



  • IIRC most successful VCs invest very early and get out often early-ish too. The real enshittification that dangers the actual position of the company often happen much later. At that point the company is traded publicly and there’s a large anonymous body of shareholders - they only care about profits. VCs are actually a little smarter and care about longer time frames as in that early stage often much larger (relative) growth rates are possible.

    At a late stage (think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc today) growth is much more difficult. How could Google grow today? They’ve saturated the search market years ago. So the only way of making more money is by sucking more money out of their existing user base. And they absolutely need to do it, as there’s huge pressure on the managerial class to do it, because the shareholders demand it. If the managerial class doesn’t do this (because often some older idealistic people know it would compromise the quality of the product), or they aren’t capable of doing it - they will get replaced by people who are more willing or capable - even if it’s detrimental for the company when viewed longer-term. VCs i would argue care all about profits, “but”. (they are smart enough to see the big picture. They are also small enough or “few enough” that they can communicate among themselves in order to agree on a more wise plan. That’s why they often get out once most of the possible (easy) growth has been achieved. They either know that now growth is much more difficult, or that the company’s value is much more stagnant - ow might decrease even. They can get out and invest their money in other more promising endeavours.

    The shareholders of large publicly traded companies are not that coordinated as they cannot really agree on anything other than just “growth”. More sophisticated strategies would have to be negotiated (and communicated) among thousands. The only unifying bond among shareholders is that they want profits. Think about it: many shareholders often don’t even know what companies they own as they are often part of other investment packages. Maybe you’re retirement plan has invested in stocks of 50 different companies, or 10 different fonds that have invested in others still. That is a form of dilution (?). It’s very difficult to communicate any strategy more sophisticated than “profits”. (a side effect is also that many people have invested indirectly or wothout knowing in endeavours that make their life more shitty/expensive when they retire - without knowing it.) There isn’t enough nuance in the wants of the masses as to want any more sophisticated strategy than simply “growth”. That’s why only short term growth can be thought.

    Of course sometimes also large companies can grow 2.5x or something like that. But it’s rare and takes more time. The exception makes the rule here. Early stage growth that VCs bank on is much more explosive i think. More like 10x or 100x.

    EDIT: sorry i typed this on mobile and it shows.







  • Oh, i have a brilliant one:

    A few years ago i spent a lot of time converting .flac-files into .ogg-files in order to put on my oldschool iPod. As I did a lot of repetitive typing - entering $dir / for file in flac ; do convert etc / mkdir -p $somewhere/$artist/$album / mv $somewhere/.ogg->$new_dir/ and so on - I thought: “hm lets just write a loop over loops for all the artists here and then all the albums and at the same time create the nested directories somewhere else… hm actually in the home directory… and later love everything on the iPod at once.”

    so i was in my music folder with the artists-folders i wanted to convert. i did something wrong

    So i did my complicated script directly in the shell. I made something wrong and instead of creating a folder “~/artist/album” I created 3 folders in my current working directory: “~”, “artist” and “album”. hmph dammit gotta try again… but first : i have to clean up these useless folders in the current dir. so i type of course this: "$ rm -r ~ artist album " after about 5 seconds of wondering why it took so long i realized my error. o_O I stopped the running command, but it was (of course) too late and i bricked my current installation. All the half-deleted config files made or impossible to start normally and extremely tedious to repair it by hand, so i reinstalled.




  • I worked as a projectionist in 2009 when the cinema got its first digital projector in order to be able to show Avatar in 3D. At the start of the movie no one actually knew if it would work. Due to the movie being encrypted - with every cinema in Germany waiting eagerly for the password - No cinema was able to play the movie. But everywhere cinemas were packed with people. Because of fuckups somewhere in this incredibly stupid system the movie was delayed about half an hour (IIRC) nationwide. With no-one knowing if it would eventually work - especially nice for the people working at the cinema having to deal with angry audience members.

    At the same time the 2D 35mm film-version we also had started without any problems (it was massive and pretty dicey to carry it around).









  • Yeah it was not specifically only about Deutsche Bahn, but also an observation about one of the multiple problems that drives the enshittification.

    One Point that Deutsche Bahn definitely did was to find out which connections are mostly used by people ( tickets for these connections thereby contribute mostly to DBs revenue) and kind of abandon the less profitable connections. That’s accounting in my book.

    What they did (counting passangers by rail-connections) wasn’t possible before, as DB-tickets were sold not electronically and couldn’t easily (cheaply / with little work-hours) be turned into data sets and analyzed.

    IIRC tickets were priced much differently - they weren’t fixed to specific trains but to connections (no “Zugbindung”). So There wasn’t even (easily available) data to when most travellers were using the trains.

    Today with all the data being generates automatically the accountains know much better what costs and what earns DB money and they prioritize based on that. Once you get into the habit of that even things that are obviously always costs (like fixing rails or bridges) will be outsourced or avoided. (like the supermarket example - it’s obvious that someone has to restuff the shelves, but once you have all the data and see only red numbers you try to separate it away and not do it (so it gets turned into a subcontract with probably unrealistic conditions that some other companies are underbidding each other in order to gain the contract - even if this means that their employees will not earn a living wage from it. It’s a perfect system that also pushes responsibility and blame away from the outsourcing company. they can always blame the sub contracting company for underpaying or not follow safety regulations (even if they can only fulfill the sub contract by operating this way)).


  • I’m German and have been in France quite often in recent years. It’s fascinating to hear their opinions on Germany. Outside our country is still imaged as having great engineering, efficiency - that Trains run on time. It’s quite puzzling to me.

    I came to the conclusion that the only real innovation in the last 30 years has been accounting. largely driven by neoliberalism. So every neo liberal country has kind of become more similar. Germany is not special, but has the advantage of having a lot of old successful companies that only slowly get sold of to international conglomerates. (Like Kuka etc). We behave as shitty as the rest, but our downward trajectory started higher up.

    Modern computers and software made it possible to account for basically every item in a company with little cost. Before you’d have needed so many people and hours of work to judge profitability of small things that it wouldn’t have been sensible to do so. CAD-Software also enables a special kind of accounting - simulating hardware components enables engineers to judge which parts are necessary and how much thickness is really needed. This is a huge and complicated process of optimization.

    Accounting made it possible to turn a mostly opaque company structure that ran inefficient (but mostly on par with the competition) and judge every employee, every item. That’s why supermarkets have outsourced the job of restuffing the shelves to a different company (that has to somehow make it work with the shitty pay that get). But it’s also the reason why appliances seem to hold just slightly over the warranty period. CAD-simulations made it possible for the accountants to change the products (make them shittier) so that people would need to buy new ones often.

    The Deutsche Bahn is the same. Has made it possible to invest the smallest amount possible, because they realized they can just work with the deterioration infrastructure as well - most people don’t have a choice and have to take the late train anyways.

    It’s the same with telecommunications here btw. With only few companys owning most Internet services they realized they don’t have to invest a lot into fiber. People need Internet and will have to pay anyways. It’s more profit to just raise prices.