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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • He’s not paying 1billion for a single defamation case. For one thing that’s the sum of multiple cases against him, and the more significant thing is that he lost because he did not fight it through the legal process and got a default judgement entered against him, and the most significant thing is that this amount is awarded due to punitive damages.

    The amount is not simply meant to compensate the aggrieved party. That would have been capped to a much smaller amount. However because of a continuous series of intentional deceit and fraudulent actions during the lawsuit itself, punitive damages were awarded instead, where the point is to set an example against such behavior in court cases.

    That extra punishment is for the benefit of the legal system rather than the aggrieved, it was something he could have simply avoided by just fighting the court case through the normal legal process. He would have simply lost and would only have had to pay a fraction of that amount.

    The point of the ability to punish subversion of the legal process is that otherwise, no legal consequence for ignoring the court, would mean that anyone could completely ignore the legal process (which is what he was attempting to do).


  • No, I interact more on Reddit. That’s where the community conversation is. Ideally, it would be on Lemmy, but the difference between our ideal state and reality isn’t bridged by wishing it to be the same. There’d need to be practical drivers that push the two into meeting and those drivers don’t exist for Lemmy to reach kind of critical mass that would allow it to be a replacement for incumbent social media platforms.

    Lemmy is for people who don’t want those social platforms, or an “also-ran” platform that exists in parallel with them. The federated model which gives it survivability and freedom is also the reason that it won’t have the broad appeal that would allow it to scale to incorporate input from all of society.

    Many will rationalize that it’s good to keep the rest of society out of Lemmy too, and I’m not getting into whether or not that’s good, but either way it means that Lemmy will not have the broad adoption that makes the big social media platforms interesting to most people.


  • This is correct. Real estate prices don’t mean anything to the vast majority of companies since most of them are not in the real estate business and likely even lease their office spaces. It could have a minor impact to the balance sheet if deemed impaired but it doesn’t amount to something that matters in valuation which cares more about P&L, cash flow, and working capital.

    Business leaders are human, they don’t know what the fuck is going on, or how to “increase shareholder value”. So for lack of better ideas they can just tell employees to go back to the office.

    Basically, if you don’t know how to stop a ship from sinking, you can at least change the curtains on the windows so you look busy on the way down.

    They first, make the decision to go back to the office, second, they tell their team to go find reasons to rationalize the decision. There isn’t a nuanced logic to arriving at the conclusion, they make these calls off-hand on gut feelings. The thinking comes in later from the direct reports trying to fill in the logical gaps, even if the decision wasn’t a logical one to begin with.


  • On barbell, it’s becomes a bit dangerous, you don’t want to fail asymmetrically and drop the bar, it’s a lot of weight. On a smith machine, a small weight variance is no big deal, go for it.

    With dumbbells, yes you can assymmetrically load, it will greatly decrease your overall power output but increase isometric demand on abs, obliques, and spinal erectors to maintain stability. For example, some people like to do lunges carrying a dumbbell on only 1 side at a time for that kind of challenge.





  • Cheatcode for flavor is chicken bouillon. Powdered chicken stock has almost no calories but packs a ton of non-specific savory flavor (umami) that you can put into any savory dish. If you feel like a dish is bland, you salt it and it still feels not salty, try adding chicken bouillon and the flavor pops out. It’s why Australians go mad about their “Chicken salt” which is mainly bouillon and salt. (If it still taste bland after this point, you probably need some form of acid like a vinegar in the dish.)

    Tuna itself is pretty generic in flavor so just go ham with spices and seasoning. I like to mix my tuna into scrambled eggs (1 whole egg + 200g of egg white), mix it with gochuchang red pepper paste for big flavor, mild heat, and slight sweetness. You can also use Laughing Cow cheese wedges for about 45cal. Mix that into the pepper paste with a little bit of water to turn it into a creamy consistency. You can use the cheese wedge trick or cornstarch slurries to make creamy sauces/gravies for whatever dish you want with minimal calorie cost.

    There’s a lot of exercise programming you can do to optimize your fitness, but when we know diet is like 90% of the aesthetic outcome, leveling up cooking skill is probably much more important for creating tasty lean food you have no problem adhering to.



  • It’s about ego. The boss doesn’t know how to make the company perform better, they’re all out of ideas. They have to change something to make it look like they’re doing something, so RTO is the low hanging fruit.

    There’s really no more justification needed than that. Looking at practical benefits to explain RTO pushes won’t get you answers because the practical benefits are so slim and conditional relative to the strain it creates.

    It’s all about ego. They self-identity as the hardcore alpha boss that deserves high pay because they “earn” it. So to massage that ego, they go into the office even though they dont need to, and are meeting with nobody there. It’s pointless but it feeds their ego.

    So they feel alone at the office…and in that worldview they are hardworking (an assumed condition), and nobody else is there, therefore everyone else is not hardworking (regardless of how much work they’re actually doing).


  • In the current state people can take classes on say Zoom, formulate a question, and then type it into Google, which pulls up an LLM-generated search result from Baird.

    Is there profit in generating an LLM application on a much narrower set of training data to sell it as a pay-service competitor to an ostensibly free alternative? It would need to pretty significantly more efficient or effective than the free alternative. I don’t question the usefulness of the technology since it’s already in-use, just the business case feasibility amidst the competitive environment.