Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

in the Lemmy industry, some people try to accumulate meaningless points and drive "engagement" by reposting bad posts from the website that everyone here claims to hate.......and it works.

Manufacturing here. We dont have a trained QC person looking at our units before sending them to the customer. Its just some guy that checks physical dimensions. We have electronics that comes in for RMA and never gets retested on its way out. Most of our customers dont install the pieces for months so the process control gets muddied by time. Literally everyone in our company knows this. We just got our ISO 9000 cert anyway, because no one really cares about doing things right. We just put untested parts in shit and cross our fingers.

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.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Truth

For those in the US: no medical office dealing with insurance has a clue what they're doing. Why can't you ever "shop around" and get a price for your procedure? Because nobody really knows the price until they submit the claim. It's basically impossible for a human to keep track of the policies that change daily across dozens of insurance providers along with the hugely complicated calculations needed to get a price. And that's before they have software try to rearrange your claim to get the most money possible from insurance companies. And good luck figuring any of this out yourself; even if you manage to track down the policy data, it's written completely in medical insurance jargon and might even leave some room for interpretation.

Basically, even with the insane amount of work medical coders (people who process and interpret medical claims and policies) do to try and stay on top of it all, at the end of the day, you have to just submit the claim to a black hole and hope that it gets accepted. The patient's cost is whatever it spits out.

Also, dozens of doctors across the US get fired, banned from practice in their state, or have their licenses revoked every month. Some of them are unfortunate, like doctors being forced into retirement due to old age or physical inability to do their job, but many others get in trouble for practicing without a license, sexual harassment/assault, and, of course, prescription drug abuse. This data is all publicly accessible, but being on atrociously designed and maintained government websites, it's nearly impossible to keep track of who's in trouble without paying for third party software to do it for you. If you don't happen to catch it, it's pretty easy for a medical provider to move a few states over and set up shop like nothing happened.

Edit: Oh yeah, our company was very serious about HIPAA training and treated patient data with extreme caution. Some offices... really didn't. It got to the point where we'd straight up have to reject ticket requests for having identifying information. Our ticketing system was secure on our end, no telling what was going on outside of it.

As a side note, for the trans people out there, don't accept that you have to be misgendered on your medical records without a bit of a fuss. There's special modifiers that specifically override restrictions on sex-based medical procedures when your reported gender doesn't match their requirements. Unfortunately, whether your provider knows about or uses them is a bit of a toss-up.

On a brighter note, as stupid as it is that every single diagnosis has to be codified specifically for the insurance industry, there are some funny codes in there.

Some favorites:

• Bitten by a dolphin (specifically the first time. There's different codes for a second bite and any more after)
• The weirdly specific set of codes for various injuries on different watercraft
• Of course, something stuck up your ass

Now there's a new standard coming into effect, ICD11. The biggest complaint with ICD10 was the overly specific codes they had to keep track of. They did change things so that you didn't have a completely different code for every single type of, say, dolphin injury, but they did add many more animals.

Your PC runs firmware written by some companies with really sloppy engineering and security practices. Whenever possible opt for a computer that runs open source firmware (coreboot).

They don't clean the planes. Like you may think when they go in for maintenance they get a deep clean or whatever? Nah. Between flights? It might get a wipe down if it looks too dirty but probably not. Every now and again someone has to wipe the lavatories and the galley, but that's it.

That replacement infrastructure being installed in your area was PE stamped decades ago. It is quite possible he/she who did it has died at this point. All the mistakes they made are still in there and getting replicated with each upgrade. If anyone tries to fix anything it will be an uphill battle. Parts are specified that don't exist so without eBay nothing would get shipped.

The person managing the project is in sales and their degree is probably in English Lit. Sometimes you get lucky and it is a construction worker. Their boss is the mayor's nephew and has the contract because of a rule that stuff used in local area must go through a local company. An example: a replacement part that we sold last month was for 2,200 dollars. The local company charged 11,500 for doing nothing except repackaging the part. A big fuck you to the Arizona tax payer.

All your infrastructure is using way more electricity than it needs. We can't get anyone to shift over to more efficient systems because that would involve effort on their part. We also can't get them to upgrade the service, instead we just have to find by trial-and-error what parts can deal with under voltage. Code has to be designed to deal with the frequent brownouts because no one wants to pay for a generator. Speaking of code the number of times I am asked to give people a printout of code is much higher than you would expect.

Global warming is ripping us a new one. Everything is flooding that shouldn't be flooding plus heat is everywhere. Waterproofing and heat upgrades are taking time because the original specs have to be updated. Which can't happen because they don't want to get the PE in to stamp it. Because that would make the project cost more eating into sales.

In short everything keeping you alive. Your water, garbage/recycling systems, sewage, trains, traffic signals, and roads was designed by better minds who are now dead. Everything now is a mixture of nepotism and short term self-interest trying to blindly copy what didn't even work that well to begin with under new conditions. If you want a job for life go work in infrastructure, if you want to be happy with your life go work in anything else.

Oh you might be wondering how is it we all haven't died from choleria and rabies infected garbage rats by now. The answer is simple. The very lowest paid people, the operators and maintenance crews, are actually good at what they do. Perfect? Hell no, however they get the job done. Which you wouldn't know given how hard the government is working to cut their pensions and not increase their salaries but there it is.

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)

In Germany: Big car manufacturers do have round-table sessions where they share research informations with each other. However, they do not co-ordinate pricing.

When you feel like car manufacturers release models with similar specs within a short time frame, this could be why.

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.

There was not a single Intel / X86-64 "unibody" Macbook in the entire history of Apple that didn't have a heat stress issue 😂. First unibody was released in 2009, the first w/ "M" chip fixing the problem in 2020 🤦‍♂️

When IT says that an issue was caused by something someone else did, it's often them just passing the blame around. Source: I am an IT Director.

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.

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.

We’re guessing. Everyone claims it’s all based on research and advanced modelling, but we really have no idea and and are bullshitting our way through presentations and press conferences.

We say whatever we can to keep our shareholders invested and the public buying. I’ll let you guess the industry, but you probably know.

I have worked for 5 different companies that needed to be PCI compliant and every one of them will fully decided not to do certain things. Not all of them were even hard, a lot of times it was simply the person making the decisions just didn't want too.

So that's mine. Credit card security is not taken seriously but the vast majority of places that accept credit cards

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.

Was a secret, I guess, but dereailments... soooo many derailments.

New battery for your phone? US Customs says fuck that. So used battery from the scrap bin you get.

Disclaimer: I quit that industry back in 2017.