I’ve worked in retail, and… That’s not an actual RFID alarm sticker, and it’s not just there for the potential theives.

Some manufacturers will actually put an RFID tag on the inside of the box. These tags work exactly like the RFID stickers, and they’re deactivated the same way (usually a magnet underneath the store’s counter).

This sticker is actually a “chip away” anti-theft sticker. They frequently go on the same products that get RFID stickers, but all they do is tear apart instead of peeling off. They’re mostly an internal tool for LP to try to link thefts and fraudulent returns (that number is the store number that it came from). This one just happens to conveniently have “ALARM” printed on it as a secondary feature, letting thieves know that the item will set off the alarm without showing where the RFID tag is.

Edit: I should probably add that they also put them on high-theft non-alarmed items, but they probably didn’t get separate sets of stickers.

It’s either a typo, or a lot or sass for a PopSci article.

“Look at this huge, unparalleled rise in carbon levels millions of years ago, it’s so huge… Psych! We do that every five years! Buckle in, buckaroo, things are about to get bad!”

it’s like building stuff with Legos.

I got Minecraft when it was still in beta, for exactly that reason. I was in college, I had some free time, and I liked messing around with the demo - it reminded me of all of the fun I had playing with Legos as a kid. I think it cost me maybe $15?

Now, a decade later, I still play it fairly often, and given all of the content that’s come out since then, it might be the most worthwhile $15 I’ve ever spent.

It’s pretty easy to break water down, but it’s also super easy to make it - just burn anything organic.

Usually you can’t see the water being formed, but there’s actually a really common example: car exhausts on a cold day. If you notice a bit of water dripping out of the tailpipe of the car in front of you at a red light, that’s actually the moisture in the exhaust fumes condensing on the cold tailpipe.

The responses are tagged “translator,” so I ran “kde” into Google translate set on detect language… Turns out, “kde” is both a Linux thing and the Czech word for “where.”

That’s… Actually probably exactly how Star Trek would handle modern Earth. Part of the prime directive is that any species that gets contacted by the Federation has to achieve a certain level of technological and societal advancement first, and we’re close, but I’m pretty sure we’d get put on the “check back in a century” list.

So, if they’re nice aliens and they just watch us for a while and leave, maybe our first contact just got waitlisted?

Apparently they’re pretty good - my coworkers loved them when I worked at a sporting goods store!

You nailed just about everything that I’ve been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it’s definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren’t any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

…Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.

It’s not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.

The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can’t immediately tell if it’s working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it’ll probably work given time, but it won’t do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.

The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it’s money that stays in the company’s coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it’ll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.

So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they’re a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.

I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.

For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.

For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.