I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
Well that just sucks. So if you’re a die hard fan of [anime name] and happen to be European how would you find something close to the source material?
I noticed that “creative liberty” first with the Dragonball series. I grew up watching the dubbed versions then one day discovered a little import store that sold tapes of the series with the original dialogue subtitled into English. There were a noticeable amount of differences in the story and it was slightly mind blowing to me at the time.
It’s not exactly what you’re looking for but the website https://animelon.com lets you use English and Japanese subtitles at the same time. And you can look at definitions of individual words. It is probably only useful if you are beyond a beginner level though.
I think using Japanese subtitles would be the way to go in general assuming you can read them but have trouble with listening.
Technically not my industry anymore, but: companies that sell human-generated AI training data to other companies most often are selling data that a) isn’t 100% human generated or b) was generated by a group of people pretending to belong to a different demographic to save money.
To give an example, let’s say a company wants a training set of 50,000 text utterances of US English for chatbot training. More often than not, this data will be generated using contract workers in a non-US locale who have been told to try and sound as American as possible. The Philippines is a common choice at the moment, where workers are often paid between $1-2 an hour: more than an order of magnitude less what it would generally cost to use real US English speakers.
In the last year or so, it’s also become common to generate all of the utterances using a language model, like ChatGPT. Then, you use the same worker pool to perform a post-edit task (look at what ChatGPT came up with, edit it if it’s weird, and then approve it). This reduces the time that the worker needs to spend on the project while also ensuring that each datapoint has “seen a set of eyes”.
Obviously, this makes for bad training data – for one, workers from the wrong locale will not be generating the locale-specific nuance that is desired by this kind of training data. It’s much worse when it’s actually generated by ChatGPT, since it ends up being a kind of AI feedback loop. But every company I’ve worked for in that space has done it, and most of them would not be profitable at all if they actually produced the product as intended. The clients know this – which is perhaps why it ends up being this strange facade of “yep, US English wink wink” on every project.
IT in the EU:
Due to some EU laws, there has to be a “cookie consent” dialog on every website that uses cookies. I would estimate that more than 50% (probably too low) of these popups are cosmetic only and it doesn’t actually matter if you click accept or reject.
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I used to work as a contractor for an environmental remediation firm. All the waterways that you joke about not swimming in are actually full of some awful carcinogen. Old industrial plants dumped awful chemicals for years and years. Some of these issues are being slowly addressed, but regulation is always well behind the science. But often, if the liability is significant enough, companies will spend millions of dollars a year to kick the can down the road doing studies and monitoring so that they can avoid what would be hundreds of millions to actually remediate the problem.
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
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Then you start off fresh going “this time it’s going to be different” but the same fucking things happen and you end up cramming that project in 3 weeks.
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
Truth
How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it “put ads here, here and here”.
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes “I know this guy, they’re an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I’ll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face”. Someone else yells “I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn’t bought one yet.”
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That’s extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
::hugs my PiHole::
It’s a good start but you absolutely want in-browser ad blockers too. Not all crap is served from dedicated garbage serving hostnames.
I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.
Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
Afaik even in other “similar” industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.
I’m not sure what kind of role you had in the industry, but I’m not sure what you’re saying is entirely accurate… although there are some bits in there I agree with:
Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Accurate. And that’s ok. A programmer whose job it is to optimize the physics of bullet ricochet against thirteen different kind of materials can go really deep on that, and they don’t need to (or have time to) zoom out and care about the entire game. That’s fine. They have a job that is often highly specialized, has been given to them by production and they have to deliver on time and at quality. Why is that a problem? You use the corrolary of film, and nobody cares if the gaffer understands the subtext of the Act 3 arc… it’s not their job.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Which one? A game designer lacking in gaming experience likely wouldn’t get hired anywhere that has an ounce of standard. A UX designer without gaming experience might get hired, but UX is about communication, intuition and flow. A UX designer who worked on surgical software tooling could still be an effective member of a game dev team if their fundamentals are strong.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
Again, which one? Investors probably don’t know much about the specifics of gameplay or game design because they don’t need to, they need to understand ROI, a studio’s ability to deliver on time, at budget and quality, and the likely total obtainable market based on genre and fit.
Publishers – depending on whether you are talking about mobile or console/box model – will usually be intimately familiar with how to position a product for market, what KPIs (key performance indicators) to target and how to optimize within the available budget.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
This has happened. I’m not sure it’s an actual trend. There are lots of misses in the game industry. Making successful products is hard – it’s hard at the indie level, it’s hard at the AAA level. I would estimate there are a thousand failed Indies for every one you call out as ‘kicking a big studio’s butt.’ Lots of failed AAA titles too. It’s just how it goes.
The same, by the way, is true of film, TV, books and music. A lot of misses go into making a hit. Cultural products are hard to make, and nobody has the formula for success. Most teams try, fail, then try again. Sometimes, they succeed.
As a paramedic, if you can’t remember your name, address, and social security number, we’ll take you to the hospital but you probably won’t get a bill. Unless you tell the hospital, then we’ll get a face sheet. Stay Safe, John and Jane Doe.
Those little widgets that show that something is hot, trending or for a limited time are time based tags and don’t represent any real analysis.
Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.
And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.
I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.
Taking an ambulance to the ER does not ensure that you will be seen faster. A decent chunk of ambulance patients go right out to the lobby to wait like everyone else because everyone is triaged based on their illness or injury, not their mode of transportation.
Depending on the state ( in the US) security guards can have all the same powers as real cops. Literal rent a pig. Also depending on the state, security guards are little more tham unglorified receptionists. The exact same job responsibilities, plus being cpr cert’d, for half or less the pay.
Which reminds, y’all be nice to receptionists. That job sucks. be dicks to security if you want to, most of them are only there for 3 months, and the ones who stay longer are probably bootlickers, so, y’know, you do you.
There was not a single Intel / X86-64 “unibody” Macbook in the entire history of Apple that didn’t have a heat stress issue 😂. First unibody was released in 2009, the first w/ “M” chip fixing the problem in 2020 🤦♂️
