_manifold (u/_manifold)

_manifold commented on The agony and ecstasy of Costco (2023) blog.benedictfritz.com/th... · Posted by u/simonsarris

Ramiro · 2 years ago

The most significant value I get from Costco is that the quality is consistently high and the options are well curated. I like not having to go through 100s of brands of basic staples like yogurt, toilet paper, milk, etc...

_manifold · 2 years ago

Personally I've found that "well curated" sometimes becomes a double-edged sword in Costco's case. Mainstream brands can be expected to be available perennially; however, smaller/niche items and brands will often get cycled out or replaced by something else which may or may not be comparable.

Many times I've found products at Costco that I enjoy, only for them to suddenly stop carrying them a week or a month later.

_manifold commented on Wendy's Bold Move: Dynamic Pricing Strategy Set to Transform Fast-Food Industry bnnbreaking.com/world/us/... · Posted by u/paulpauper

ilaksh · 2 years ago

I think it could be great if they execute it well. Which they probably won't.

It would be nice if you could use an app and see the projected pricing at different times.

I think it's good if some people can be encouraged to go to lunch a little earlier or later and the staff doesn't get slammed by a huge lunch rush.

_manifold · 2 years ago

Several years ago there was a craft beer joint in my area that had a gimmicky "stock market" system for their pricing - the more a certain beer was purchased, the higher its price became, and the less popular brews slowly dropped in price to stimulate demand. Ultimately, they dropped this system for being "too irritating" and moved to a standard static pricing model.

It sounds like the Wendy's thing is based more on time of day and historical analysis of sales, so we will have to see how it plays out. But I think and the end of the day people will become more annoyed when their favored menu item is more expensive simply because they arrived at the restaurant sooner than they expected, or whatever other criteria Wendy's starts basing their pricing on. Having price tracking on their app does seem like the next logical step, but ultimately an annoying gamification (and vaguely dystopian) in my opinion.

Perhaps their customer base feels different and they've done their research on that - I'm not in that group so I'm more of a bystander here.

_manifold commented on Unity's CEO is out, but that still may not be enough for developers theverge.com/2023/10/10/2... · Posted by u/serverlessmom

BariumBlue · 2 years ago

I personally think Unity suffered from success - I suspect they grew to match their fairly outsized success, found out they were fairly large and needed more revenue to sustain themselves, and so they increasingly looked to and focused on pushing advertising to make up shortfalls, while the game engine was increasingly turned into a vehicle for profitably integrating advertising into games.

My suggestion: Personally, Unity really needs to go lean, embrace their developer experience more, and cut costs. There are 7703 staff (as per wikipedia) - and I don't wish this upon the employees, but they can probably afford to cut some fat.

_manifold · 2 years ago

Indeed, it seems like their whole plan to address profitability issues is just "get bigger", but all that's done is create a bloated, immobile monster that's completely lost touch with thee customer base that got them to where they are.

At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.

_manifold commented on Goldman Sachs Predicts 300M Jobs Will Be Lost or Degraded by AI forbes.com/sites/jackkell... · Posted by u/saeedjabbar

mihaic · 3 years ago

The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer.

This bracket has been in recent decades the enforcers of the status quo, helping widen the wealth gap all over the developed world. Maybe once they get a taste of what everyone is going through they might change sides and actually align with the general population on these issues.

_manifold · 3 years ago

> The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer.

What are you basing this on? Perhaps I'm missing your exact meaning of "AI cambrian explosion" but right now I think it's arguable that artists and writers are the most threatened by this wave of generative AI - neither of which are usually considered top paying positions.

_manifold commented on Godot Arrives in the Epic Games Store godotengine.org/article/g... · Posted by u/riidom

smolgumball · 3 years ago

I wonder if they patch a base installation of some kind (think: a core project selector / launcher) and then individual projects contain a copy of the engine at time of creation?

_manifold · 3 years ago

While it will inevitable be larger in the future, Godot's current executable size is so small something like this could actually work.

At the very least I would want something like Unity Hub which can manage both projects and engine/editor version installations. Being locked into whatever version of Godot Epic Store considers to be "current" sounds like a nightmare.

_manifold commented on Teens can proactively block their nude images from Instagram, OnlyFans arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

AdamJacobMuller · 3 years ago

Not necessarily. There are much newer technologies than simple hashes of files now, which are effectively content-aware image hashing algorithms which are highly resistant to manipulation techniques (re-encoding, resizing, even things like rotation/blur) they are of course tunable algorithms which the more you want to catch the more false positive rate there is but you can already today do much better than simple file hash.

Look at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna and https://openbase.com/python/ImageHash/documentation

_manifold · 3 years ago

I think it's definitely more useful, especially long term, in a more controlled system where the government agency that is handling the actual CSAM is simply submitting hashes of the content the company (Microsoft, Apple, or whoever else) to add to their database with which they can use to flag/review suspicious content.

However, the system described in the article is open to the public, and simultaneously privacy/anonymity oriented. I see this as a double-edged sword. While it does protect the identity of legitimate users, that also opens it up to nefarious actors flooding the system with images/videos taken from legitimate content creators on OnlyFans other sites, potentially getting those creators' content flagged/removed. Even if this simply triggers a manual review, you could feasibly spam the system with so many that it grinds to a halt.

_manifold commented on Teens can proactively block their nude images from Instagram, OnlyFans arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

mikestew · 3 years ago

all they would have to do is change a single pixel and/or re-export as a different format

This sounds plausible if you don't know how perceptual hashing works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing

_manifold · 3 years ago

Yes, I did some more research on this as well. Apparently perceptual hashing is also susceptible to some pretty simple attacks:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.06628.pdf

_manifold commented on Teens can proactively block their nude images from Instagram, OnlyFans arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

_manifold · 3 years ago

>To use Take It Down, anyone—minors, parents, concerned parties, or adults concerned about their own underage images being posted online—can anonymously access the platform on NCMEC’s site. Take It Down will then generate a hash that represents images or videos reported by users as sexualizing minors, including images with nudity, partial nudity, or sexualized poses. From there, any online platform that has partnered with the initiative will automatically block uploads or remove content matching that hash.

This sounds impressive if you don't know how file hashing works. If a malicious actor wants to get around this, all they would have to do is change a single pixel and/or re-export as a different format.

_manifold commented on Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid frontiersin.org/articles/... · Posted by u/limbicsystem

a1369209993 · 3 years ago

To be fair, compaining about that makes about as much sense as compaining about the racist implications of the term "good Samaritan", although I agree that, in retrospect, it's pleasantly surprising that social justice warriors haven't tried to ram though a de facto ban anyway.

_manifold · 3 years ago

If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe. The lines kind of blur when you're talking about groups that are divided by some odd combination of ethnicity, religion, and nationality.

Regardless, if you look at the actual context, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is arguably meant as a message against racism and preconceived notions about people from other ethnic groups or countries.