Hail Satan.

Kbin
Sharkey

Using Mbin as a backup to my main Kbin account due to tech issues on Kbin.social. May either switch to this one permanently or abandon it, depending on how Kbin’s development goes. All my active fedi accounts are linked.

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  • 485 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • If your work hands your paycheck to a stranger, they still owe you money.

    That’s not how these platforms work. They’re not the employer of the driver. The drivers are independent contractors, which means they’re not on payroll and they don’t get a paycheck. They get untaxed earnings, which are held in their DoorDash account until they transfer them to their bank. Legally, DoorDash’s responsibility ends once they credit the driver’s account, because it’s up to the drivers to not get phished.

    Obviously, you can make arguments over the ethics of independent contract work in general, but this distinction is important to take note of, as independent contractors don’t have the same benefits or protections that employees would, and there are much different legal processes involved.

    DoorDash owes their employees money, not excuses.

    Read the article:

    [DoorDash] also said it has reimbursed or tried to reimburse workers who were stolen from.





  • It’s been years since I’ve seen them. They used to always come out around this time of year when I was a kid, but it feels so rare to see one anymore.

    At an old job I had, there was this garden-like section of this courtyard area people would take smoke breaks in. They had a special breed of grass planted there that seemed to attract the fireflies, and I guess it works because they’d actually show up to that little patch of garden almost year-round. I wish I knew what type of grass it was; I’d totally buy some seeds and do some guerrilla gardening around my apartment complex to bring back some fireflies.


  • The prompts aren’t generally considered enough because there’s too little control over the final expression, the same prompt can create wildly different outputs.

    AI art isn’t made by just entering a prompt, picking an output image, and calling it a day. There’s actually a lot more involvement necessary to get the final output to be what you want. Some more advanced pieces of AI art take hours of tweaking the prompt and redoing certain sections, balancing positive and negative prompts and their weighting, not to mention training a model in the first place and touching up the final output in Photoshop.

    There’s a very big industry behind AI art right now, and they’re not just using DALL-E prompts to do it. Whatever your thoughts about AI art may be, there’s no denying that a large amount of human labor is involved in the creation of any piece.





  • Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn’t just say “come sue us” if they weren’t wholly confident that they weren’t about to be losing any cases any time soon.

    This isn’t some huge “win” for the people; gamers aren’t gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam’s userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.


  • Because it’s not quite the good-faith gesture people are making it out to be; it’s a cost-saving measure for Valve. From the consumer standpoint, very little actually changes, as the average user isn’t taking Valve to court in the first place. It’s not as if Valve is suddenly lowering their legal funding in conjunction with this move; they’ll still defend themselves harder than most consumers would be able to, and will win their cases in court instead of in arbitration, which is even more costly for the consumer when they lose.

    While arbitration favors companies, so do the courts. If anything, this just makes it more cost-prohibitive on the consumer side to make Valve face the law.











  • We did this in Austin, and I hate it. It’s probably fine if you go to the store and use your own totes, but my situation requires that I have to get my groceries delivered, so that isn’t an option for me. And instead of plastic bags which I could crumple up to take up near-zero space and actually reuse, my house is filled with enormous paper bags that have already ripped before I got the groceries up the stairs in the first place and take up tons of space and have basically zero reuse value and go straight into the trash after one use. I used to reuse plastic shopping bags all the time; waste basket liners, collecting random odds and ends to throw away together, organizing and storing dozens of random cables and chargers, etc.

    I wish there was a better way to dispose of plastic bags. Because while I understand the reasonings for the ban, the result is majorly inconvenient and ironically results in more single-use products in my life.