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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • They also fired all their park workers during covid and gave themselves 10 million bonuses while their workers were surviving on food stamps. Some workers had even signed non compete clauses so they literally could not use their talents elsewhere to feed themselves.

    There are plenty of things to hate Disney for, especially as they approach super-monopoly status, ruin nearly every franchise they touch, and have trouble telling what’s good or not. As a company, Disney’s morals and decisions grow more concerning every month. Disney is basically a disaster in progress.

    However, this specific complaint seems bad: it’s the wrong scale. Many companies were in the wrong during COVID, but it’s hard to look at these numbers and say the layoffs here were bad decisions based on $10M in bonuses. The scales are just too different.

    Disney laid off 32,000 park workers At a measly 40 hours per week at their “minimum wage” (formerly $15/hr, now $24/hr): that’s $83.2 million PER MONTH: $998M a year. A $10M “bonus” is 1% of that, and even smaller compared to the $6.4B of park revenue they had loss.

    The former CEO “gave up” their salary ($3M) and “bonus” ($45M in 2019), had 20-30% pay cuts to the executive staff, and a few other items. The CEO did get “$10M” in stock awards, but stock awards don’t get you off food stamps. Those stocks become nothing if the company posts bad financials, which would hurt more than just the execs.

    The $1.5B dividend payout in April 2020 looks much worse. Abigail Disney ranted about it on Twitter (now X). His rant is at the appropriate scale: Disney paid out billions before they chose to save millions. The execs got quite a bit of that dividend payout. That’s the greed.


  • Did you purposely miss the first and last questions: Which laptop is the good value?

    I never said people need to run LLMs. I said Apple dominates high-end laptops and wanted a good high-end to compare to the high-end Macbooks.

    Instead of just complaining about Apple, can do what I asked? Best cheaper laptop alternative that checks the non-LLM boxes I mentioned:

    If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.


  • Is there a particular model you’re thinking of? Not just the line. I usually find that Windows laptops don’t have enough cooling or make other sacrifices. If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.

    Even the RAM cost misses some of the picture. Apple Silicon’s RAM is available to the GPU and can run local LLMs and other machine learning models. Pre-AI-hype Macs from 2021 (maybe 2020) already had this hardware. Compare that to PC laptops from the same era. Even in this era, try getting Apple’s 200-400GB/s RAM performance on a PC laptop.

    PC desktop hardware is the most flexible option for any budget and is cost-effective for most budgets. For laptops, Apple dominates their price points, even pre-Apple-silicon.

    The OS becomes the final nail in the coffin. Linux is great, but a lot of software still only supports Windows and Apple; Linux support for the latest/current hardware can be a hit or miss (My three-year-old, 12th-gen Thinkpad just started running well). If the choice is between Mac OS or Windows 11, is there much of a choice? Does that change if a company wants to buy, manage, and support it? Which model should we be looking at? It’s about time to replace my Thinkpad.


  • Technically, it might be faster, but that’s not usually the reason. Email servers generally have to do a lot of work to confirm email messages are not spam. That work usually takes significantly longer than any potential DNS savings. In fact, that spam checking is probably the reason you see the secondary domains used.

    When the main domain used for many purposes (like servers, users, printers, vendor communications, accounting communications, and so forth) It leaves a lot of room for misuse. Many pre-ransomware viruses would just send out thousands of emails iper hour. The mass communicating server could also reduce the domain reputation. There are just so many ways to tarnish the reputation of your email server or your email domain.

    Many spam analysis systems group the subdomains and domain together. The subdomains contribute to the domain score and the domain score contributes to the subdomain score. To send a lot of emails successfully, you need both your servers and domains to have a very strong and very good reputation. Any marks on that reputation might prevent emails from being received by users. When large numbers of emails need to be controlled, it can be hard to get everyone in the organization to adhere to email rules (especially when the the problems aren’t users, but viruses/hackers) and easy to just register a new domain, more strictly controlled domain.

    Some of the recent changes in email policies/tech might change the game, but old habits die hard. Separate domains can still generally be more successfully delivered, have potential security benefits, and can often work around IT or policy restrictions. They might phase out, but they might not. The benefit usually outweighs the slight disadvantage that 99% of people won’t see.

    tl;dr

    Better controlled email reputation.


  • Time isn’t the only factor for adoption. Between the adoption of IPv4 and IPv6, the networking stack shifted away from network companies like Novell to the OSes like Windows, which delayed IPv6 support until Vista.

    When IPv4 was adopted, the networking industry was a competitive space. When IPv6 came around, it was becoming stagnant, much like Internet Explorer. It wasn’t until Windows Vista that IPv6 became an option, Windows 7 for professionals to consider it, and another few years later for it to actually deployable in a secure manner (and that’s still questionable).

    Most IT support and developers can even play with IPv6 during the early 2000s because our operating systems and network stacks didn’t support it. Meanwhile, there was a boom of Internet connected devices that only supported IPv4. There are a few other things that affected adoption, but it really was a pretty bad time for IPv6 migration. It’s a little better now, but “better” still isn’t very good.



  • Vote. Seriously. (If practical: get involved, too). The U.S. is currently in the middle of a large shift of generational power.

    Many of these changes are fairly recent:

    • 2020 was the first federal election where the Baby Boomers didn’t make up the largest voting generation.
    • It was only in 2016 that the number Gen X and younger voting numbers grew larger than the boomer and older numbers.
    • Those numbers had been possible since 2010. Despite having more eligible voters (135M vs 93M), the “GenXers and younger” only had ~36M actual voters, compared to ~57M older ones.

    Looking forward, the numbers only get better for younger voters. There hasn’t been a demographic shift like this in the U.S. in a long time (ever?). The current power structures can not be maintained for much longer. It is still possible for that shift to be peaceful. Please encourage the peaceful transfer: vote. Vote in the primaries. Maybe even vote for better voting systems. This time is unique, but change takes time. Don’t let them fool you otherwise: that’s just them trying to hold on to their power.