There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

CurlyWurlies4All , (edited )
@CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net avatar

The cost of digital advertising cannot be justified by its effectiveness (or rather lack there of). We’ve collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating the infrastructure for invasive hyper targeted ads that do not get better results than simple billboards and terrestrial TV ads even now. We’ve created a global economy of marketing, media, advertising and sales solely reliant on technofeudalist overlords who’ve provided very little actual improvement of anything.

wuphysics87 ,

Do you have additional inside knowledge?

chobeat ,

Most people in the field don’t even ask themselves this question. They all have an incentive in believing it works.

There’s a book about it though: us.macmillan.com/books/…/subprimeattentioncrisis

CurlyWurlies4All ,
@CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net avatar

Yeah it’s a good book. It’s a cycle that this issue surfaces every couple of years where someone does a study, finds that the numbers they’re given don’t match their own analysis and the ad tech platform does some PR to paper over the story.

Most people selling ads are just like the real estate agents in The Big Short. The media people make their money via rebate from the platforms by guaranteeing a certain volume of spend so they have no incentive to be putting hard questions to the platforms and the client is reliant on seeing the data which is provided by the platform with no third parties able to provide any level of transparency.

Money goes into Google, Amazon and Meta’s black boxes which spit out numbers. The agency people copy and paste the figures into a presentation and everyone congratulates each other for a job well done.

lightnsfw ,

Maybe if those invasive highly targeted ads were the least bit accurate I would buy some shit from them. Instead half the time I can’t find the product I want without wading through a sea of crap even when I give them a search with specific parameters.

Ragnarok314159 ,

(Buy Washing Machine)

“Hello, I see you bought a washing machine. Would you like to buy a few more?” - Internet Ads

chiliedogg ,

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Snapz ,

Washing machine purchase subscription, save $3.47 each month!

dropped_the_chief ,

It works occasionally. My late grandmother loves cardinals and I was advertised a card with a big red paper pop out cardinal. I paid $30 for that card, and grandma loved it.

laughterlaughter ,

occasionally

CurlyWurlies4All ,
@CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net avatar

Yep and in order for these companies to grow they must continue to increase the volume of ads being shown, which only makes them less effective, which they try and counter by making them ever more invasive.

boonhet ,

And that’s where this article comes in.

Tiltinyall ,

Imagine if an alternate timeline is already being produced in the virtual world. The one we will all be strapped into until the death of our core energy cell.

xilliah ,

Could you elaborate?

Bronzefish ,

The ice in your drink at the bar is very very dirty.

BruceTwarzen ,

I used to work at a nice bar. It was just a side gig for “fun”. I was always very careful with the ice and ice machine, because i find ice gross in general. I still found it very odd how many people just demand “questionable” ice. I’m glad if i don’t get ice, please don’t ice adds nothing but grossness to any drink.

WoodenDing ,

Not to be judge mental here, but why do you find ice “gross”? I get it if you’ve seen what the machines look like, but ice in general?

Shard ,

All ice machines require monthly if not biweekly cleaning otherwise funky stuff starts growing in the water lines and the ice trays, and other hard to reach areas.

As a former commercial HVAC guy, consider yourself lucky if a place cleans it out once a year.

images.app.goo.gl/p1PqQsmRRkzo2Pmd7

Tyfud ,

Well. Now I’ve got another fear to add to the list.

johannesvanderwhales ,

That’s true for soda and beer lines, too…

TeamAssimilation ,
@TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub avatar

I’ve never cleaned my fridge ice maker in 8 years, how much life expectancy do I have?

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

Longer than before, since you’ve been exposed to so many more germs!

https://i.makeagif.com/media/9-10-2017/d1Huh7.gif

KreekyBonez ,

invincible

Silentiea ,
@Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I second this question. How am I even supposed to clean it?

Thteven ,
@Thteven@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t know but I’ll bet your ice smells a bit off.

verdigris ,

Not if your bartender is properly trained and not a lazy piece of shit.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

I can’t imagine this to not be the case. Every bartender I know is tweaked out of their mind. Even the ones who see bartending as an art.

I’m not knocking their skill set. But they’ll be a rare breed if they think about bartending AND food safety at a high level enough to think about the cleanliness of ice.

Bronzefish ,

I would never do cocain from a dirty bartop.

Etterra ,

That’s what your coke nail is for.

Bronzefish ,

What the fuck, only filthy musician’s and djs grow those. I recommend those vials with the little spoons found in most reputable headshops (but don’t share the spoon)

Bronzefish ,

I am a very well trained piece of shit.

But I am not allowed to clean the upper part of the icemachine ( where all the slime happens) because of liabillity. I do my best to keep it clean but not all of it is possible so while its one of the cleanest icemachines I have ever seen its still dirty.

And I work in a very upscale cocktailbar in a very well regulated country.

dejected_warp_core ,

Which car company bar did you say you work for?

A major one.

stufkes ,

The use of chatgpt for writing is so widespread in higher ed, it will cause serious problems to those students when entering the workforce.

Lots of fancy stuff is written about how we just have to change the way we teach!, and how we can use chatgpt in lessons! blablabla, but it’s all ignorant of the fact that some things need to be learnt by doing them, and students can’t understand how they hurt their own learning, because they don’t know what they don’t know.

sunbytes , (edited )

I bet AI detection is going to get a lot better over time.

I wonder if there’s going to be retrospective testing of theses as time goes on.

Could really damage some careers down the line.

Edit: guys, retrospective testing means it was done later (i.e. with a more up to date AI detector).

Alsjemenou ,

Or we’re going the other way and just accept it as a tool for performing tasks that would otherwise take too much time.

Granted that it makes the problem of teaching students the basics even more important.

Dagwood222 ,

By that logic, we shouldn’t have to teach kids to walk, because they’ll be able to strap on an exoskeleton or sit in a floating chair. Heck, we will be able to make Dune style suits and never have to teach them to control their poopage.

There’s no growth without struggle.

Omega_Man ,

Writing is not similar to walking. It’s more like cursive. Perhaps writing every word will seem old fashioned someday?

BCsven ,

It has been well documented that the act of hearing the letter, thinking about the letter and doing a physical motion to create the letter provides better connections for the learning and retaining. Same for writing full cursive words. It will get dropped totally at some point, hopefully future generations always have OCR to read new found historic manuscripts. Schools have moved to keyboarding skills and it has an impact on learning.

Dagwood222 ,

weforum.org/…/wait-what-new-research-says-interne….

Omega_Man ,

Funny enough, this used to be an argument made against relying on writing.

Dagwood222 ,

And at the time it was true.

If all the knowledge you have in your society can be memorized and recited, writing it down means it can be changed.

On the other hand, if you have a society where you know of that there are over 500,000 types of beetles, it might be a better idea to come up with a way to record that information without memorization.

Just because an idea is new/old doesn’t mean it’s good/bad.

Things have to be judged on their own merits.

Omega_Man ,

Writing allows you to devote more of your mental faculties to other things. Couldn’t the same be true of AI-assisted writing?

Just because an idea is new/old doesn’t mean it’s good/bad

This is the point I’m trying to make (but apparently not very well)!

Dagwood222 ,

I see no advantage to students using AI and many problems.

Unless and until I see an advantage to a new tech, I hold my reserve. Obviously, a typewriter will give you better copy than a quill pen, and a word processor beats both.

But all three of those require the writer to come up with their own ideas.

Dagwood222 ,

I know that I learn better when I write things down on paper.

scientificamerican.com/…/a-learning-secret-don-t-…

Omega_Man ,

So do I.

rainerloeten ,
@rainerloeten@lemmy.world avatar

Once a detector is good, you can train a model to adjust its outputs to cause false negatives from the detector. Then the cycle repeats. It’s a cat and mouse game basically.

The only proper way I see is a system that is based ob cryptographic signatures. This ia easier said than done ofc.

sunbytes ,

Yeah but if your wrote your thesis in 2024, and the detector is run on it in 2026…

You’re probably busted.

It’s not like you’ll re-write your thesis with every major ChatGPT release.

TehWorld ,

Are you expecting that the for-profit college will go back and retroactively rescind degrees? What’s the end-game for re-running the thesis?

Dinsmore ,

It likely won’t be done at scale, but let’s say you are wildly successful and are now in line for a high-value position, where vetting is common. Might look pretty bad if you fabricated your whole thesis. Recently, Bill Ackman basically bullied several schools into firing their head administrators on the pretense of not citing sources correctly in their thesis papers.

sunbytes ,

It could be a new level added to the peer review of work. Nothing to do with the university. Just “other professionals”.

A thesis isn’t just an exam, it’s a real scientific paper.

And usually claims is contents as fact, which can be referenced by others as fact.

And absolutely should be open to scrutiny so long as it is relevant.

TehWorld ,

Great points. Note: I’m not arguing against it as a concept. I’m just skeptical that it’ll happen, and even if it did, there wouldn’t likely be terrible consequences for the accused, especially as that’s what science is… new facts change the outcome vs choosing an outcome and matching facts to it.

Turun ,

I bet AI detection is going to get a lot better over time.

I doubt it. ChatGPT 3.5 is good enough to rewrite small snippets of text with better phrasing, ChatGPT 4.0 can write a paragraph if given enough support. Good enough as in "the output is indistinguishable from what a human would have written.

Of course you can do even more with the currently available tools - and get found out.

There is a way to make AI generated text detectable: by slightly pushing the output towards a consistent pattern a detector can reliably judge long pieces of text as AI generated.
Imagine if the AI is biased towards consecutive words starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet (e.g. “a blue car” instead of “a navy vehicle”.). Not strongly biased, but enough so that when there are 1000 words you can look at the probability of consecutive words starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet and get a clear result.

There are two problems though: this only works with proprietary systems and only with long texts.

sunbytes , (edited )

If something was written by V3 and then published, that text doesn’t get updated every time a new version of chatGPT comes out.

The text isn’t dynamic.

Turun ,

Yes, but at some point it doesn’t matter. The AI is trained to replicate human writing. There will be a point where it becomes so good that the result is a perfect replica, where it is indistinguishable from human text. I.e. even a perfect detector will not be able to confidently declare it as AI written, not ever. Because there is no difference.

tearsintherain ,
@tearsintherain@leminal.space avatar

But over time looks like the snake eating it’s own tail as AI iterates over everything. Someone will have to create fuzzy AI to dilute the writing down.

johannesvanderwhales ,

There are a lot of entry level jobs that basically assume new employees know nothing, anyway. Seems like this will just further devalue degrees and emphasize work experience for hiring.

tearsintherain ,
@tearsintherain@leminal.space avatar

Yeah, we don’t need higher education, just low skilled workers. That’ll sort things out. /s

tearsintherain ,
@tearsintherain@leminal.space avatar

The younger kids are using it as well, it’s a problem starting at an earlier age. I don’t see how chat gtp is gonna help those kids learn. AI sellers want us to think differently. But like silicon valley, their kids are not gonna be using it. Sell it to the poor schools as the future!

VirtualOdour ,

When I was a kid people said the same about typing, homework has to be handwrittena because no boss will ever accept a typed report.

We had the same when media studies became a lesson, everyone freaking out that kids learning to watch TV is stupid but of course that’s not what they’re getting taught - media literacy turned our to be a hugely important subject even for those that don’t go on to work in the huge and ever growing media sector.

Teaching kids to use AI tools effectively is the same, you hear it and imagine ‘they put homework prompt into chatGPT and hand in the output’ it’s the same as imagining media studies as being nothing more than watching TV. AI is going to be an ever more present and useful tool in our lives so kids need to learn how to leverage and utilize it or they’ll be at a huge disadvantage.

You can’t hold back time by denying your kid a full education, they need to know how to effectively use the tools everyone else will be using.

Lightrider ,
@Lightrider@sh.itjust.works avatar

Fiat money isn’t real.

Liz ,

Any kind of money is an arbitrary store of wealth.

Bytemeister ,

IT, more specifically user support.

Let’s talk passwords. You should have a different password for every site and service, over 16 character long, without any words, or common misspellings, using capital, lowercase, number and special characters throughout. MyPassword1! is terrible. Q#$bnks)lPoVzz7e? is better. Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

1: write your password down somewhere, and obfuscate it. If an attacker has physical access to your desk, your password probably isn’t going to help much. 2: We honestly don’t expect you to follow those passwords rules. I suggest breaking your passwords down into 3 security zones. First zone, bullshit accounts. Go ahead and share this one. Use it for everything that does not have access to your money or PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Second zone, secure accounts, use this password for your money and PII accounts, only use it on trusted sites.Third, reset accounts. Any account that can reset and unlock your other accounts should have a very strong and unique password, and 2FA.

Big industry secret, your passwords can get scraped pretty easily today, 2FA is the barest level of actual security you can get. Set it up. I know it’s a pain, but it’s really all we’ve got right now.

w3dd1e ,

This is a method I heard once for remembering random passwords that I thought was clever.

Create your own alphabet of words (or random characters). A is for Apple, B is for Boy, C is for Cat…etc.

For every letter in the URL, you use the word from your alphabet. Ex:

www.facebook.com

F = Fog, A = Apple, C = Cat, E = Egg, B = Boy, O = Off, O = Off, K = Kite

Next, you need a number if you didn’t use one in your alphabet.

Facebook is 8 letters long so I might use 8. Or only letters repeated once. Or maybe you use the whole URL. Up to you, but you do it the same way for every site. You create a patter that you follow and can remember, rather than remembering every password.

Need a symbol? Assign that to the top level domain. In my example, .com = # .edu = ? .org = * etc

Put it all together and my example password would be “8FogAppleCatEggBoyOffOffKite#”.

A password for google.com might be ‘6GolfOffOffGolfLogEgg#’.

Obviously, you don’t have to do it this exact way with the alphabet, number, and symbol. The idea is that you create a set of rules that you remember and follow. If you write down “A = Apple B = Boy…” and someone finds it, it won’t be instantly obvious that it is meant for passwords.

dependencyinjection ,

This is terrible. If someone gets a couple of your passwords it’s pretty easy to work out the patterns and gain access to your other accounts.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

DNOS ,

I Guess we already have a couple of his passwords … Good job man, Sorry whats your name ?

patatahooligan ,
@patatahooligan@lemmy.world avatar

For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?

dependencyinjection ,

When Dashlane reports a breach. I change my passwords.

patatahooligan ,
@patatahooligan@lemmy.world avatar

So no vetting at all presumably since you didn’t mention it? So how do you know that Dashlane is safer than a password scheme that might be guessed by someone after they’ve already compromised a couple of your passwords?

dependencyinjection ,

Dashlane is pretty big and I’ve not seen any negative reports from security researchers. They offer bug bounties for people that do find vulnerabilities etc.

I believe the consensus is that password managers are better than any human password scheme. I could host my own manager but then there are more vectors for an attack, and why reinvent the wheel.

Bytemeister ,

Not bad, but I could see that creating passwords that are too long for some systems, and it would be vulnerable to dictionary attacks. Also, what would you do when the site requires a password reset?

Maybe do your strat, but only do every other, or every 3rd letter as a short word, and use a Caesar cipher, incrementing the cipher once each time you have to reset? Sounds kinda fun, but I don’t think most sane people would do that… Open to ideas though.

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

I’ve come across several sites with abhorrently short password limits, as low as 12.

Worse, 2 of them accepted the longer password, but only saves the first n characters, so you can’t log in even with the correct password, untill you figure out the exact max length and truncate it manually.

Even worse, one of those sites was a school authentication site, but it accepted the full password online and only truncated the password on the work computer login. That took me an entire period to suss out.

evasive_chimpanzee ,

You just gave me a flashback to a system I encountered as a student where my password got truncated, so I couldn’t log in. I had to ask the teacher what to do, expecting her to have access to a reset or something, but she just told me what my password was. It was like 3 and a half words, clearly truncated and stored in plain text.

w3dd1e ,

I personally just use a pw manager. If I used them system myself, the alphabet words would probably be strings of characters that aren’t real words and I’d probably salt them too. But yeah I imagine you could run into size limits, which is a problem.

I just wanted to share a pw strategy that seemed interesting. I used a simple pattern to make the concept easier to understand.

ultranaut ,

Or, just use a password manager and simplify your life. Reusing any password is bad practice, even if the account doesn’t seem important. Every account really should have a randomly generated unique password. A password manager solves all of these problems.

MonkeMischief ,

KeePassXC is such a lifesaver. Back up that local database a few safe places, and even the BS accounts got like 32 char passwords. Good for keeping notes too like “Why did I make an account here again?”

Like when healthcare or government stuff makes you have like 5 sign ups with various crappy contractors to access your basic crap lol.

Bytemeister ,

Until the password manager gets compromised, or you lose access to your PW manager. In that case, you’ll really wish you had implemented “Zone 3” of my plan.

mub ,

I’ve been using a password manager for years, and.I’d be lost without it, but honestly I think this is a temporary solution. What I want to see is a no password future, and just use the code given by your MFA app. Forget having a password at all. Interestingly Microsoft has been pushing for this and you can already drop passwords for personal 365 stuff I think.

Rob ,

That’s what Passkeys are aiming to do.

my_hat_stinks ,

Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.

Bytemeister ,

For absolutely best security, you would change your password to a new, extremely long, randomly generated character string every time you logged in. What the best security options are, and what users are willing/able to put up with has a very small, if any overlap.

As for writing them down, my advice is to obfuscate them. Apply your own secret code to the password, hide it in a poem, get creative. Once an attacker is at your desk, they pretty much own your shit. At that level, the only thing your password is providing is privacy, not security.

my_hat_stinks ,

Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.

librejoe ,

well, the only solution for that is to use a password generator based on length and complexity. I have used it once and am considering using it for all my accounts with each its own password. I live in a safe place so having them written down is not really an issue.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Is using a password manager for your phone recommended or no?

Deepus ,

Yes, as long as your master password is strong and you again enable mfa

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Thank you, I do.

Bytemeister ,

As long as your phone is secure, and the manager only stores data locally, I’d say yes. I would still encourage you to have any “reset capable” accounts secured with a strong password and 2FA that is not in your PW manager.

As with all things IT, there is a tradeoff between comfort/usability and security.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Is there one password manager that is better than another? Thanks for answering.

Bytemeister ,

I can’t really endorse any one over the others. We use LastPass at my workplace, but they were compromised recently. I didn’t use the service though, still reset my passwords just in case.

I would look for a manager that has a policy of transparency. Breaches happen, they are a fact of life. Both the systems being used, and the people using them are not infallible. I would be more comfortable with a service that notified me immediately when they were breached, and provided easy resolution. When LastPass was breached, they were extremely open about it, and notified their users. Plus, if you use a PW manager, it’s pretty easy to go back in all your services and update the passwords, since you have a list of them and a random PW generator easily accessible. It probably took most people less than an hour to recover.

explore_broaden ,

Bitwarden is free and easy to use. They also encrypt more metadata to prevent the kind of breach that lastpass recently had (see community.bitwarden.com/t/…/47214).

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Yeah I had LastPass but obviously want to change

morriscox ,

“Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.”

explore_broaden ,

It still seems to be working fine for me, so I’m not sure what happened.

MrPoopbutt ,

How do passwords get scraped?

Bytemeister ,

Shitty sites that store PWs in plain text, or they get compromised and the password is figured out from the hash. Probably the most common way right now is phishing, and with AI/LLM it’s pretty easy to do spearphishing attacks on a large scale. The target enters their password on a seemingly legit site, but it’s actually an attacker’s site that logs the PW. There are lots of ways to get a password, and password-only authentication is considered pretty weak, even with a “strong” password.

WhatYouNeed ,

Have . and ; and / in the middle of your passwords. If a site is compromised and email + passwords are taken, these are usually stored in a csv file. If someone attempts to delimit the csv data, these characters can split you password into multiple cells.

quinkin ,

Anyone with the barest of skills will have escaped any of these characters.

WhatYouNeed ,

True. But it will eliminate a percentage of the script kiddies.

mub ,

Yeah, no. Computers don’t care if a password is complex or not. It can’t read “words”. That complexity stuff was introduced because humans think like humans, and wanted to force people to use words not easily found in a dictionary. Security is about password length, so +@#£h&1g/?!:h&£( is equally as vulnerable to a brute force attack as abcdefgh1234567 because of how modern encryption works, it I length that counts.

It is good advice to use a formula to build memorable passwords. I like a simple sentence you can type them without thinking about, as this also won’t appear in a dictionary (avoid famous movie quotes, use something meaningful to you).

Fact is complex passwords created a new security risk; the written down password. Also, frequent forced password changes made it worse. Most businesses only ask staff to change passwords every 3 to 6 months these days. And web sites.never asks you to change your password.

The dirty (not so secret) secret is that, the biggest risk to security is not how complex your password is, but how easy it is to trick people into just giving away access to their accounts.

These days MFA is what makes logon credentials safer and passkeys are slowly proving that passwords themselves are not worth it for most systems.

tl;dr - complex passwords are a throwback and not better than long memorable ones like 1Verycrappycode!

Rob ,

This is full of terrible advice. Password rotation is an outdated practice.

Don’t ever reuse passwords with “zones”, just use a password manager to generate long and secure passwords for every account. Then enable MFA wherever possible, and Passkeys where they have been implemented.

Then have a recovery method for the password manager stored in a secure place.

Honytawk ,

The world is littered with fake empty buildings used to obscure phone line junctions and internet provider stuff.

Almost every neighbourhood has one. But they look like normal houses, so you can never tell unless you know where to look for.

Stalinwolf ,
@Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca avatar

Bruh…

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

Can you share the address of a specific one? (Does it count as doxxing if nobody lives in it?)

Mycatiskai ,

youtu.be/VQz9JwtmLy4?si=WmRY1M6tiy-IOOlK

This video shows a bunch in Toronto.

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

Thanks for sharing! That was really cool. I’m going to be looking out for those from now on.

librejoe ,

I live near one on pharmacy and finch area, and there’s another one at Huntingwood and birchmount.

Omega_Jimes ,

Underground railways use houses for ventilation as well.

OldWoodFrame ,

Can’t believe Harriet Tubman got all that infrastructure up.

Dagwood222 ,

It’s too bad you didn’t get to post that on Juneteenth.

Tramort ,

What do you look for?

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

Someone shared a video upthread.

stoy ,

I know of two buildings sort of like that, they both look like a bungalow office building with an empty parking lot and a card reader by the door, one building has plastered over windows, the other has normal but dirty windows

Omega_Jimes ,

Here’s one on Google maps maps.app.goo.gl/55qqbQRYY7abKPVy9I drove past this for years without thinking about it until one day I drove under it.

Now that I know what it is, it’s pretty obvious, but how often does the average person really inspect houses as they drive by?

Edit: maps links suck, 3911 Frances St, Burnaby, BC V5C 2P4

BaumGeist ,

That one’s pretty obvious though. It’s got no windows nor doors, and like 8 condensor units out back.

I bet there are ones that are less obvious

Omega_Jimes ,

There are other ones, this is just the obvious one. I’ve only spotted one other in the wild and I forget where it was.

WanakaTree ,

Haha I love how it has four reviews/3.3 stars

bandwidthcrisis ,

Los Angeles had hidden oil rigs.

lamag.com/lahistory/hidden-oil-wells

Snowpix ,
@Snowpix@lemmy.ca avatar

There’s a power utilities building disguised as a house just down the street from me. You’d never know it wasn’t just a house besides the industrial equipment behind it, the lack of a car in the driveway and the warnings plastered on the front door.

librejoe ,

We have them here in Toronto. Some of them have been removed, but there’s about 3 near me.

Nolvamia ,

The YouTube channel The Tim Traveller has covered a few (along with a bunch of other esoteric sights, I really enjoy his stuff).

Example: youtu.be/iXSkjw0Kytk?si=J_X-3rbCluOcXRyz

GrappleHat ,
@GrappleHat@lemmy.ml avatar

Nice try FBI

madcaesar ,

Nice of you to think the FBI gives a shit investigating corporate malfeasance.

montar ,

It’s more likely to be a sb like me who just gathers stuff like that for future use in (maybe) questionable way.

Skanky ,

A lot of the “generic” or “store brand” packaged foods are literally the same exact product as the name brands, only in different boxes/bags

Atlas_ ,

Where this isn’t true, it’s extremely effective propaganda

mudmaniac ,

I’m not so sure about food, but for many mass market products it is indeed true that the same manufacturer can be engaged to make the same product under different branding. The difference then comes down to the corners cut to meet the client’s pricing. Crappier boxes, thinner bags, packing material, and quality inspection. Assuming the core ingredients are not compromised in some way.

trolololol ,

I would like that… Saving on a smaller package for chips and cereal sounds great, most of it is air anyways.

Breezy ,

No you dont. I have worked in 2 groceries stores, the bags with less air get way more crushed and broken while stocking. Having bigger bags with a lot of air keeps the chips integrity in tact.

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

That’s true to a point. 50% gas by fill level is ridiculous though.

wolfpack86 ,

What is the company’s incentive to make the package bigger than it needs to be?

Shipping costs come two fold… Weight and number of pallets. Weight change is negligible here, but the amount of air they need to ship will increase. They are incentivized to reduce it to a minimum to save on shelf, storage, and distribution costs.

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

They’re also incentivized to keep the same size packaging (both for logistical and public perveption reasons) and ship less product in those packages. People are willing to pay $6 for a big bag of chips, despite the big bag weighing 150g less than the normal bag 5 years ago.

They don’t get paid by the gram, they get paid by the bag. A bigger bag looks more impressive, and thus can be sold for more. Same for those tall skinny beverage cans. They look bigger than the regular cans, but are actually 25ml smaller, and yet go for a similar price.

This will continue until the price per gram is what people look for (emphasis on this at the point of sale would help), or the mass of each product is standardized. 50g, 100g, 200g, 350g, 500g, 750g, and whole kg sizes only, none of this 489g nonsense.

wolfpack86 ,

I don’t agree with the can example. Those are physically smaller and lack meaningful slack fill.

Your points stand for the first purchase. After that people will know the proportion of chip to air, and be annoyed by it. If they could do a bag smaller with minimal chip breakage and less air they would both succeed at getting more bags out per pallet and be lauded for not cheating people by selling air.

The slack fill is functional, and I don’t see much incentive to over do it.

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

You underestimate how little people think when purchasing things. None of this would be a problem if everyone looked at the price per 100g first, but ooo 3 $5… And then the size reduction usually goes alongside a packaging change, like jumbo or family size; “New look, same great taste!”. It’s all a distraction, out of sight, out of mind and all that.

Also, the 330ml cans are taller, and because of the square-cube law they only need to be a little skinnier to be smaller. They’re also not usually displayed next to the normal 355ml cans. Out of sight…

Also, who is going to laude a big corp product for a logistics change in the first place? I barely see anyone complaining about shrinkflation for packaging reasons as it is. I’d see a better slack fill level on one product and think, “This must be old stock” or “This is the last time we’ll get bags this dense”.

half_built_pyramids ,

I can tell the difference between generic and real cocoa pebbles. Fuck cocoa krispies too.

Honytawk ,

For foods, they usually use cheaper ingredients, but it is the same recipe from the same factory.

stoy ,

My sister worked at a dairy for a while, they both made the name brand version of cottage cheese as well as the off brand. They made several brands of cottage cheese, so you are abolutely right that different brands of product are made in tye same factory, but depending of the brand or country it was shipped to the recipie was changed slightly based on the customer’s request.

johannesvanderwhales ,

And those recipe changes were probably aimed at lowering costs, not increasing quality.

stoy ,

That, or taste…

OldWoodFrame ,

The one example I’m familiar with is a name brand ice cream company that produces the store brand ice cream too…in that case the recipe is different, cheaper ingredients to cut costs to the bare minimum. But using the machines for a higher volume saves money.

I’m sure ‘same exact item’ does happen too but just ‘same manufacturer’ doesn’t mean exactly the same item.

librejoe ,

here in Canada, generic cereal is NOT the same as name brand.

boonhet ,

I’d expect that to be damn near all of them because most stores don’t run their own production companies

11111one11111 ,

Butter. I read somewhere sometime ago in a galaxy far far away that there is only a handful of US butter manufacturers which make all the butter for all the brands. Just different packaging. I have 0 proof or evidence and going entirely off memory of prolly a reddit post 10 years ago so google it and lmk if it’s true.

xilliah ,

Many game companies specifically target vulnerable people, who end up spending their entire pay check every month, and are called Whales.

Melatonin ,

I’m on a game, Whiteout Survival, you’ve probably never heard of it. I haven’t spent a penny, but I was curious about how much one obscure “upgrade” cost. Mind you, there are hundreds of purchases in the game.

It was $100 US, and it said 29,000 had been sold… in the last WEEK!

2.9 million dollars a week for NOTHING. And that’s just that one obscure item, far from their biggest seller.

And that’s just in one game you’ve never heard of.

chunkystyles ,

It’s highly likely they fudge those numbers or outright lie.

Melatonin , (edited )

Reason for saying that?

BTW: not the company reporting those numbers. Google Play’s numbers.

chunkystyles ,

Because every single thing about those games is a psychological ploy to get people to spend as much money as physically possible. They run studies on what tweaks get people to spend more or less and I guarantee the numbers they show in the store have been studied.

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

Also, who’s going to call them out on that? What court wouldn’t throw that out immediately? And even if you did win, the company wouldn’t even notice. You probably signed away the right to be part of a class action lawsuit in the Terms of Service anyway.

cows_are_underrated ,

I knew multiple people who spent several ten thousands USD in State of Survival. A fucking mobile game.

Ragnarok314159 ,

A buddy of mine spent several thousand on Marvel Heroes. He wouldn’t go out to lunch with us, and finally I asked him what was going on. He eventually told me, we had a “dude…we are adults and can’t be doing that shit. Imagine the hookers and drugs you could have bought!”

He quit, but still tells me he thinks about it and is immediately filled with regret.

xilliah ,

You’re a non-monetizer, just like 95% of the players. The game will make you some form of offer in order to convert you into a paying minnow, dolphin or whale. Whales are rare, less than a percent of the players, but they generate a significant amount of the revenue.

Companies compare their conversion rate with each other and have specific goals to meet. 5% for example is good. If your company has say 3%, you’ll want to focus on improving that. Each product will have a specific goal here, and otherwise is shut down because there’s a customer acquisition cost. Games easily cost more to market than to develop.

A lot of effort is spent on the first offer. This is where you’ll see a screen that makes an amazing offer you’ll seriously consider. It’ll have something that is high value but incredibly cheap and so temporary. This isn’t to earn money, it’s simply to convert you. Because after you’ve spent your first dollar you’re likely to keep spending.

Melatonin ,

Yeah it’s been showing me that banner every time I start the game since the very beginning.

And I nope it every time.

xilliah ,

Yeah not the best design

sunbeam60 ,

They’ve just learnt it all from Vegas.

stoy ,

They hire behavior specialists.

stoy ,

I was suckered into the shark cards on GTA Online, I worked terrible hours and it was my escape.

I bought shark cards for thousands of SEK ocer a year or so, not much in compared to normal whales, but I did feel the addiction drawing me in harder.

Then one day I had just had enough, and uninstalled the game, else I knew I would continue.

I am glad though, the money I spent was not wasted, it taught me a valuable lesson about what to look out for, and how to recognize sinkholes like this.

xilliah ,

It’s good that you managed to wake up and take care of yourself. Players with that pattern are called dolphins.

stoy ,

Thank you, I do my best, I had no idea obout the dolphin name, fun!

xilliah ,

There’s worse things to be called I suppose

Floon ,

They have ARPU targets (Average Revenue Per User) and UAC targets (User Acquisition Costs). Whales contribute significantly to the game’s bottom line. Non-paying customers are vital, because player population is a game quality, and Whales need a population to notice how awesome they are.

But game companies don’t tend to separate Whales from other players (at least not the ones I’ve worked for), they tend to care about ARPU, which is more stable, and a much easier target to shoot for. And they want to keep UAC down, which lowers the required ARPU for a successful game.

sexual_tomato ,

Here’s an industry talk about how to prey on whales

youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4?si=1sjNUt8VX4Z5wky2

xilliah ,

That’s a great link. There’s just so many people exactly like him.

Yerbouti ,

The quality of education at college and university is in free fall.

corsicanguppy ,

I fear too many universities are businesses designed to fund seminars; and students graduating are whether an afterthought or an actual negative for them.

It was related to me that, because they want to keep their customers, one can solve any problem at uni - grades, minor victimless crimes, etc - simply by offering to take more courses. The only problem money can’t solve is the one where the student has no more money, and it’s over quickly after that (saw that one happen).

HobbitFoot ,

It is far worse than that.

Universities have a lot of metrics that they are judged against that don’t lead to a quality education. Research doesn’t lead to good undergraduate students. A good pass rate just means the curriculum is soft enough to keep don’t students from failing.

So you have university presidents who are incentivized to increase prestige and they aren’t going to focus on the quality of education because that doesn’t lead to better metrics. If presidents try to defend their universities’ way of teaching, they get replaced by those who follow the system.

Ragnarok314159 ,

Why I likes the ABET requirement for engineering. Still have an 80% fail rate due to the standards, and you get audited for coursework.

I have yet to meet an employer who will hire an engineer from a non-ABET school.

isyasad ,
@isyasad@lemmy.world avatar

Everywhere? or in what country/place?

Yerbouti ,

In Quebec/Canada at least. Haven’t teach in another country but I fear it’s similar.

Croquette ,

What is causing that? Anything I can do to offset that when my children will be old enough for it to be a problem?

mynamesnotrick ,

Worked in higher Ed for a decade. Can confirm.

ZombiFrancis ,

I went to college before the internet was ever considered a valid source for any material. But using the internet made research extremely easy if I could determine the book source for reference.

I went back to college right around that time the internet just became the default source for everything. It was staggering how little information was expected to be known. The implicit ubiquitous access to information was a staggering foundational shift.

Dagwood222 ,

weforum.org/…/wait-what-new-research-says-interne….

Floon ,

US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.

librejoe ,

lol education? you mean terrorist chanting camps.

sexual_tomato ,

Yep it only took 1000 allu akbars to get my mechanical engineering degree 🤡

miridius ,

Was it ever good?

hyacin ,

Soylent Green is people.

sudo42 ,

If you value your privacy and you have a choice between using a browser to access a service vs installing their app, use the browser.

Online services can get much more information about you through an app vs the browser. Browsers are generally locked down more. Apps in general have access to much more information from your device.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

Department lead.

The website team is small, but incredibly effective. Everything works. Everything is mobile friendly, responsive, fast. It’s a way better experience.

I love my app developers, but they’re always behind. Not their own fault. Mobile development is complicated. There’s so many screen sizes, iOS vs Android differences, platform permissions, etc.

The big reason for us to push the App on people was to get more brand awareness on the App Store. But the website is so much more better.

You literally can use it as a web app right into your phone and get a better experience.

And it’ll be such a dark day when I have to dissolve the App team (and hopefully convince them into web dev)

Stoposto , (edited )

Why not a responsive web app packaged into native viewer app? Depending on your utilization of native components of cause.

My team had the same issues you described so we build the web responsive and made that the “Apps” on the App Store + Google Play. There is still a tiny native components that hook into the web so you still need those native developers knowhow, but yes they will have to switch in large to web based development.

Less maintenance, more devs for the main product, faster progress, fewer headaches with Apple and Google tooling.

Edit: forgot to app that our customers loved that more features are available now on the “Apps” and that things work the same between devices

librejoe ,

But where is has the compromise happened? The Kotlin/Flutter/swift code written? The database? not being sarcastic just unaware.

vingetcxly ,

Its all useless if the very operating system ur using is collecting info about you. Stop using windows

laughterlaughter ,

Stop using windows

lol I’m sure OP meant mobile apps.

I hate windows, but c’mon. Stick to the main point.

It’s like saying “I prefer oranges over strawberries” and then in comes someone and says “Trump prefers mangoes. Fuck Trump!!!”

MystikIncarnate ,

This is the main reason why I quit Facebook and other services. Anytime you access them from mobile via a web browser it corners you into a “download our app” page. Facebook started doing it with messenger and I knew I had to get out.

I’m not giving Zuckerberg that level of access to my data.

cooltrainer_frank ,

Former process engineer in an aluminum factory. Aluminum foil is only shiny on one side and duller on the other for process reasons, not for any “turn this part towards baking, etc” reasons.

It’s just easier to double it on itself and machine it to double thickness than it is to hit single thickness precision, especially given how much more tensile strength it gives it.

Also, our QA lab did all kinds of tests on it to settle arguments. The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small. But if you like one side better you should wrap it that way, for sure!

darklamer ,
@darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small.

Your particular choice of wording here makes me very curious: Do you mean that there really was a measurable difference (which was trivially small)?

cooltrainer_frank ,

Yup, the lab could tell a difference! Shiney side (so mill roller facing, as opposed to the dull side which faces the other layer of aluminum) was marginally more reflective, but I believe (and a former coworker also remembered it as) it was less than a tenth of a percent (<0.1% for the visual folks)

Anyone who says it affects cooking time or something is mistaken, I’d wager.

darklamer ,
@darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yup, the lab could tell a difference!

Awesome!

trolololol ,

Today I learned numbers are visuals but words are not. Wtf dude!

Colonel_Panic_ ,

Jokes on you.

I baked my casserole with the shiny side up and pulled it out at 59 minutes and 55 seconds, when it was supposed to go for an hour.

So take that Dull Side!

Dagwood222 ,

Such men are dangerous!

limelight79 ,

Welcome to the Dull Side.

evasive_chimpanzee ,

Any info on surface roughness? I’m thinking shiny side would be smoother and therefore less sticky, though I don’t know how much the passivation layer would affect it. Probably no where close to making a difference at the end of the day, but I’m curious.

cooltrainer_frank ,

It was a fair few years ago, but yeah, the oxidation on it will be so much smoother than the delta in surface roughness that I doubt it’d make much difference. Lemme reach out to a metallurgist from there and see what he thinks!

Gobbel2000 ,
@Gobbel2000@programming.dev avatar

Now that’s the kind of industry secrets I opened this thread for.

Ragnarok314159 ,

Post your spectral emissivity study or GTFO!

dejected_warp_core ,

I mean, maybe if you bake a stone cold potato that was in the fridge and then cook it for two hours? But even then we’re probably talking about a handful of minutes at the most.

Dkarma ,

Matte side isn’t non stick?

cooltrainer_frank ,

Correct. Just a manufacturing decision. It looks a lot more different than it actually is.

cooltrainer_frank ,

Okay, my buddy is gonna take foil tomorrow and run it over the profilometer (?) tomorrow and see. I’ll report back with more numbers and less hand waving when I have it

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

I’ll be here to read those numbers

sexual_tomato ,

I’m an engineer in a totally different industry but I want to know what the numbers are

zerofk ,

If the Internet has taught me anything, they’re 42 and 69.

tyler ,

Reynolds wrap literally has this as a faq on their website because so many people think it.

cooltrainer_frank ,

This is all I found on their site about it, which aligns but isn’t as much detail as I hoped

With standard and heavy duty foil, it’s perfectly fine to place your food on either side so you can decide if you prefer to have the shiny or dull side facing out.

cooltrainer_frank ,

Update: sorry to be an OP who didn’t deliver. My buddy never made the measurement. I’m hoping he will. Sorry everyone!

Infynis ,
@Infynis@midwest.social avatar

With the exception of at large buildings in dense city centers, just about everywhere else, utilities enter a building at just some point on the back, out in the open. This includes utilities that feed alarms and security cameras.

While some places will have systems in place for situations where these outside connections have been severed, like independently operated cameras on an intranet, cellular data backup for alarms, electrical generators, etc., most places don’t, so successfully circumventing their security is just a matter of cutting all the cables on the back of their building at the same time, and then being gone before they notice

Krotz ,

This is dependent on where you live though. In the Netherlands most utilities are buried under ground and enter buildings subterranean.

vzq ,

But they are not buried particularly deeply. If you have drawings, or just some sense of where the meter boxes are in a particular set of houses, you can make quick work of them with a spade and ten minutes or so.

And that’s why you want a camera on your front yard.

kevincox ,
@kevincox@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m not an expert on modern alarm systems but it seems that it is very common and fairly inexpensive to have cellular data backup. Not every system has it, but many do. In that case cutting the main connection will likely result in someone appearing on site fairly quickly.

Many cameras also have some form of local buffering. So even if you are gone before someone does show up you still may find yourself recorded.

But at the end of the day just put a bag over your head and you can be gone by the time anyone shows up without leaving a meaningful trace. Other than the very top-end system security systems just keep the honest people honest.

corsicanguppy , (edited )

75% of American drinking water needs treatment to reduce particulate and parasites, and the treatment additive used to render the water safe is produced at a single chemical plant located in an area of severe flood risk – which means that a flood could take it offline for a day or two, or damage it for weeks.

(Efforts to build a second site recently fell through due to ever-changing regulations. Of course they’re stockpiling it in some mountain bunker, I’m sure)

The next Katrina could give us a brain-worms infestation via tap-water.

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Are you saying the chemical plant provides the treatment or that one plant is somehow responsible for polluting 75% of American drinking water?

I_am_10_squirrels ,

I think the former, based on my limited knowledge of the water treatment industry. There aren’t many manufacturers of low margin commodity chemicals, most people are in specialty chemicals with higher margins.

corsicanguppy ,

Nah, lemme reword that. Thanks!

Waterdoc ,

I don’t know the details about alum production (assuming that is what you are referring to), but there are many alternative coagulants available now. Sure the supply logistics would be incredibly challenging and many people would have to boil their water or use point-of-use filters, but this take is pretty doomer in my opinion. Most plants use alum because it’s cheap and easy, not because it’s their only option.

Farvana ,

I work at a plant that uses one of those alternative flocculants (due to our source water chemistry). Our logistics are incredibly shaky at the best of times, due to the extremely limited number of producers.

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