Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
Sounds like it’d be pretty simple to just replace it and not tell them. If they tell you they know it should’ve broken down by now, just ask, “Why, did you intentionally sell me something defective?”
Psst, that’s another secret
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
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.
For those in the US: no medical office dealing with insurance has a clue what they’re doing. Why can’t you ever “shop around” and get a price for your procedure? Because nobody really knows the price until they submit the claim. It’s basically impossible for a human to keep track of the policies that change daily across dozens of insurance providers along with the hugely complicated calculations needed to get a price. And that’s before they have software try to rearrange your claim to get the most money possible from insurance companies. And good luck figuring any of this out yourself; even if you manage to track down the policy data, it’s written completely in medical insurance jargon and might even leave some room for interpretation.
Basically, even with the insane amount of work medical coders (people who process and interpret medical claims and policies) do to try and stay on top of it all, at the end of the day, you have to just submit the claim to a black hole and hope that it gets accepted. The patient’s cost is whatever it spits out.
Also, dozens of doctors across the US get fired, banned from practice in their state, or have their licenses revoked every month. Some of them are unfortunate, like doctors being forced into retirement due to old age or physical inability to do their job, but many others get in trouble for practicing without a license, sexual harassment/assault, and, of course, prescription drug abuse. This data is all publicly accessible, but being on atrociously designed and maintained government websites, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who’s in trouble without paying for third party software to do it for you. If you don’t happen to catch it, it’s pretty easy for a medical provider to move a few states over and set up shop like nothing happened.
Edit: Oh yeah, our company was very serious about HIPAA training and treated patient data with extreme caution. Some offices… really didn’t. It got to the point where we’d straight up have to reject ticket requests for having identifying information. Our ticketing system was secure on our end, no telling what was going on outside of it.
As a side note, for the trans people out there, don’t accept that you have to be misgendered on your medical records without a bit of a fuss. There’s special modifiers that specifically override restrictions on sex-based medical procedures when your reported gender doesn’t match their requirements. Unfortunately, whether your provider knows about or uses them is a bit of a toss-up.
On a brighter note, as stupid as it is that every single diagnosis has to be codified specifically for the insurance industry, there are some funny codes in there.
Some favorites:
- Bitten by a dolphin (specifically the first time. There’s different codes for a second bite and any more after)
- The weirdly specific set of codes for various injuries on different watercraft
- Of course, something stuck up your ass
Now there’s a new standard coming into effect, ICD11. The biggest complaint with ICD10 was the overly specific codes they had to keep track of. They did change things so that you didn’t have a completely different code for every single type of, say, dolphin injury, but they did add many more animals.
After the staff are done drinking coffee for the night, we only brew decaf. If you want caffeinated coffee close to closing time at a restaurant, ask for an Americano or other espresso drink.
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%
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.
Monocultures in Agribusiness. One ‘public secret’ many outside of the industry might not be aware of is the prevalence of monocultures in crop farming. Vast expanses of land planted with the exact same genetic line of a crop. While this makes farming operations easier and often more profitable in the short term, it’s a ticking time bomb for pests and diseases. One well-adapted pathogen could wipe out an entire crop species in an area (look up citrus greening in Florida), because there’s no genetic diversity to halt its spread. But hey, it keeps the costs down…until there’s no food to eat.
Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.
It really doesn’t matter which one unless it’s like super high end. And you’ve almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.
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.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.
Shout out to Banjo Kazooie, an older platformer from the Nintendo 64 game era, where the antagonist always speaks in silly rhymes. So the translators needed to translate and also make it rhyme while also keeping the context and humor intact. They took creative freedom of course because there simply isn’t a good match but it actually enhances the game in a way. So if you played the game in French before and now switch to English you’ll get a fresh set of jokes and rhymes.
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 🤦♂️
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.
And how you’re tracked online. I’ve worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don’t see you,the user, and your data.
I just click “female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone” and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they’re super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that’s advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won’t even get into the audience side of things and they’ll stick to keywords: they’ll show you an ad because you searched for “autumn home decor” and that’s all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don’t have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don’t understand it, and it’s true, they don’t have time… so then Google takes your “autumn wreath” keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for “Christmas trees”, because they’re both seasons and they’re both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn’t interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn’t fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren’t there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It’s fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it’s bad for everyone except Google.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we’re just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.
Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.
Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.
At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).
It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.
IMO, for the average, healthy customer, the sanitation requirements are overkill. But not every customer is, so the rules help protect the less healthy customers.
The biggest thing about food, is most of it is pasteurized by the cooking. Raw foods like salads are the ones that need a much higher standard.
I can guarantee you that many of the rules keep even healthy guests with solid immune systems from getting sick or even dying. The FDA Food Code is like 700 pages. There are A LOT of rules. Many seem overkill from a layman’s perspective, but they protect against unlikely but serious consequences. There are a ton of ways that contamination can occur, even after the food has already been cooked.
That you don’t notice is just a good sign that you’re eating at safe places.
The worms in those strawberries are just some extra protein.
And that is why the Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries!
Not worried about that as much as things that scurry. Barf.
If you want to feel the thrill of hunting some scurrying critters for extra protein, you can get the protein activity package. It’s normally only 17.99 €, but if you also bring a friend, you get a -50% discount.
Wow on sale! Sign me u— waitaminit…
Loading animations on websites and some apps that give you a percentage and messages about what’s going on are usually faked with animations. The frontend for things like that usually just puts fake messages and animations because it’s not easy to track the stages of complex steps happening on the backend. It’s possible in some cases but I don’t think I have ever seen a real working version of a loader like that in my 15 years of experience.
Not every “smart” software solution is smart nor is every “AI powered” software having AI.
AI is not a meaningful term.
If you ask people if a piece of software that never loses at tic tac toe is AI, most will say yes. Everyone I’ve asked that didn’t already know why I was asking said yes.
I cannot separate that piece of software from any piece of software.
I’ve literally had this conversation with the marketing department. It’s marketing. Tell me what you want to say is AI, and I’ll give you a justification.
I think the waters have been muddied for a long time by referring to NPC behavior trees and state machines in games as AI. You can apply that to just about any software that takes input and makes a decision. Then you have the movie version of AI which is sentient computers. So decades of use without any actual meaning have made the word useless in actually communicating anything
I love how divergent those two popular interpretations of AI are, too. One is all Skynet and scary and all-powerful and the other is being refactored for the umpteenth time because navmeshes broke and all the enemies are T-pose floating 10cm in the air.
