Ask Lemmy

Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.

I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

The biggest "secret" is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell "famous people funerals at a reasonable price". You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I've found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.

How online ads actually work.

Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".

The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.

One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."

The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.

That's extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.

Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There's no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they're all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.

Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It's in their agreement that you'll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won't break.

The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the "Nam-Cam" that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you'll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.

Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Truth

Supermarket employee here. We have a "fresh" fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.

Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they're lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some .... people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.

Long story short, "fresh" fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.

I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.

I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.

No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.

IT in the EU:

Due to some EU laws, there has to be a "cookie consent" dialog on every website that uses cookies. I would estimate that more than 50% (probably too low) of these popups are cosmetic only and it doesn't actually matter if you click accept or reject.

Outsourced IT provider here:

90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff's personal home devices.

The reason they're not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.

I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.

Lots of programmers and artists don't really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.

Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.

Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.

You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.

This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.

Afaik even in other "similar" industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.

Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.

Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.

The English language version often don't even translate, they write their own version, calling it "creative liberty". This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.

That's why claims of people of having "learnt Japanese from anime" are dubious in the best of cases.

Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I'm also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.

Private mental health providers in the US are pretty unsupervised and have a conflict of interest in that they make more money by keeping their patients/clients unwell, which can lead to negligence and abuse. The only thing keeping in line is the possibility of someone informed and insightful enough to report them to the licensing board or pressing a lawsuit.

For example, if a provider has poor integrity, it is in their best interest to not treat depression, but rather help the patient/client feel good for the moment. What the patient/client experiences is that they feel better when they see their provider, so they become dependent on their provider. This ensures the provider a reliable source of revenue.

Another issue is that masters level therapists, while capable of providing treatment for simple cases such as a clear depressive episode, are not properly trained to conduct thorough assessments for complex cases, meaning they can misdiagnose quite easily. Complex cases would be better treated by a well-trained psychologist that can conduct thorough psychometric assessments that are quite sophisticated and take lots of time to analyze. These services are costly and the vast majority of insurance policies won't cover them.

Relevantly, yet another issue is insurance for mental health. Most insurance policies that pay for mental health services pay low, so the care you receive can be substandard since the more effective providers are charging what they're worth in a market economy. One example that comes to mind is Better Help. They pay providers insultingly low, like around $30/hour, while effective providers are charging ~$150/hr out-of-pocket. That means that when someone uses Better Help to obtain care, they're getting the bottom of the barrel therapist.

Lastly, the majority of family and marriage therapists aren't properly trained in narcissistic emotional abuse. This can mean that therapy would not only be a waste of time, but can make things much worse as they can help the narcissist abuse the victim even further. Narcissistic abuse is quite complicated and requires a relationship therapist that specializes in that to properly assess and help the victim escape.

Tips: If you have been seeing a therapist for 12 sessions, and you haven't realized any considerable long-term changes, find another therapist. Also, if your therapist doesn't call you out on your bullshit, let's you ramble about tangential matters, or focuses on helping you overcome specific weekly struggles, rather than helping you develop skills and restructure deep cognitive matters to address them yourself, find another therapist. An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.

Note: I am not a therapist. I have just worked in the mental health field and have friends that are therapists.

The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.

Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.

This pertains to the US:

A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don't really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.

Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said "But I need to get provider approval for that.." I told her "I think you better talk to the doctor then."

Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said "Oh my god, yeah of course he's approved for the emergency list.."

Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you've got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it's been so strained ever since covid...

The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.

Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source

If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.

Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don't be afraid to reach out for support. If you don't have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don't give up hope.

Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.

Burning waste qualifies as recycling.

I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.

Accounting is a goddamn mess. There's lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we're supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world's audit, tax, and consulting needs. They're supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You're worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.

And the only reason it continues to work is society's social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don't have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we're all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It's bonkers.

I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I'm in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.

Technically not my industry anymore, but: companies that sell human-generated AI training data to other companies most often are selling data that a) isn't 100% human generated or b) was generated by a group of people pretending to belong to a different demographic to save money.

To give an example, let's say a company wants a training set of 50,000 text utterances of US English for chatbot training. More often than not, this data will be generated using contract workers in a non-US locale who have been told to try and sound as American as possible. The Philippines is a common choice at the moment, where workers are often paid between $1-2 an hour: more than an order of magnitude less what it would generally cost to use real US English speakers.

In the last year or so, it's also become common to generate all of the utterances using a language model, like ChatGPT. Then, you use the same worker pool to perform a post-edit task (look at what ChatGPT came up with, edit it if it's weird, and then approve it). This reduces the time that the worker needs to spend on the project while also ensuring that each datapoint has "seen a set of eyes".

Obviously, this makes for bad training data -- for one, workers from the wrong locale will not be generating the locale-specific nuance that is desired by this kind of training data. It's much worse when it's actually generated by ChatGPT, since it ends up being a kind of AI feedback loop. But every company I've worked for in that space has done it, and most of them would not be profitable at all if they actually produced the product as intended. The clients know this -- which is perhaps why it ends up being this strange facade of "yep, US English wink wink" on every project.

Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.

[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you're getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you're getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don't need. We're forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It's insane, it's wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can't afford it, so they don't get the shit we give away to people who don't need it.

I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can't monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.

As a paramedic, if you can't remember your name, address, and social security number, we'll take you to the hospital but you probably won't get a bill. Unless you tell the hospital, then we'll get a face sheet. Stay Safe, John and Jane Doe.

Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.

I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There's a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you're looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.

I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the "useful data per mouse" ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.

New home construction materials are the lowest possible quality that will meet specs. The allure of a new coat of paint and modern design masks the cheap quality and low durability. Some doors are basically slightly stronger cardboard. My theory as to why American homes have gotten so huge is that for the same budget you can get a much larger volume of materials than in the past.

I used to work as a contractor for an environmental remediation firm. All the waterways that you joke about not swimming in are actually full of some awful carcinogen. Old industrial plants dumped awful chemicals for years and years. Some of these issues are being slowly addressed, but regulation is always well behind the science. But often, if the liability is significant enough, companies will spend millions of dollars a year to kick the can down the road doing studies and monitoring so that they can avoid what would be hundreds of millions to actually remediate the problem.

Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.

It really doesn't matter which one unless it's like super high end. And you've almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.

Taking an ambulance to the ER does not ensure that you will be seen faster. A decent chunk of ambulance patients go right out to the lobby to wait like everyone else because everyone is triaged based on their illness or injury, not their mode of transportation.

Magazines are routinely reprinting articles from the last year every year again, slightly changed. Especially timeless stuff like "Why is tick season so bad this year?" or "This is how you bake the perfect apple pie".

Phone systems that give you the prompt, "Press # for more options" etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don't enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.

Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.

Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)

When your favorite band cancels their gig because the lead singer has "come down with the flu", that's industry code for "got too wasted, and is currently too busy getting alcohol and possibly drugs out of their system to perform".

I even worked one show that had to end after 20 minutes because one guy in the band was visibly under the influence, refused to play, talked to his hallucinations, then spent a few minutes talking to the audience about how his foot was evil and wanted to kill him, before the tour manager could drag him off stage. Then he tried to assault several backstage staff for not allowing him to cut off his foot. This was on a tour that promoted alcohol free rockshows btw, so we didn't provide alcohol to the artists backstage. God knows what he might've purchased from our local street dealers lol.

The next day in the papers, the headline says "[the band] cancels first week of reunion tour after flu outbreak" 🙃 Yes, of course

It is virtually impossible to remove yourself from advertiser's rolls.

Thanks to the new CPRA regulation, you can ask companies to delete everything they know about you. Great!

Except that the way the law is written, that often includes deleting the fact that you asked to have your data removed. So the next time they get your data from a broker, (or the next time a broker gets your data), you're right back at square one.

In theory, if you managed to send simultaneous requests to every company that's holding your data, you could wipe the slate clean...until the next time you used a website.

There are so many data sets out there that we are all a part of. And if your data is in just a single one that didn't get wiped, everyone will end up with it again as a matter of course.

Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we're just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.

Most automotive technicians in the US are paid 100% commission. The idea of being sold something you didn't know you needed is how we make our money. Also shops will employ more techs than they need because it doesn't cost them if we're sitting around, waiting for the next job.

Many software developers care even less about security than the people who use the software. Their attitude is that it’s just more work to do things in a secure manner. It’s only after a major security breach that they fix their security holes.

every restaurant job has free food. only the good ones have management endorsement.

Not every "smart" software solution is smart nor is every "AI powered" software having AI.

Loading animations on websites and some apps that give you a percentage and messages about what's going on are usually faked with animations. The frontend for things like that usually just puts fake messages and animations because it's not easy to track the stages of complex steps happening on the backend. It's possible in some cases but I don't think I have ever seen a real working version of a loader like that in my 15 years of experience.

Depending on the state ( in the US) security guards can have all the same powers as real cops. Literal rent a pig. Also depending on the state, security guards are little more tham unglorified receptionists. The exact same job responsibilities, plus being cpr cert'd, for half or less the pay.

Which reminds, y'all be nice to receptionists. That job sucks. be dicks to security if you want to, most of them are only there for 3 months, and the ones who stay longer are probably bootlickers, so, y'know, you do you.

Monocultures in Agribusiness. One 'public secret' many outside of the industry might not be aware of is the prevalence of monocultures in crop farming. Vast expanses of land planted with the exact same genetic line of a crop. While this makes farming operations easier and often more profitable in the short term, it's a ticking time bomb for pests and diseases. One well-adapted pathogen could wipe out an entire crop species in an area (look up citrus greening in Florida), because there's no genetic diversity to halt its spread. But hey, it keeps the costs down...until there's no food to eat.