Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

Outsourced IT provider here:

90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff's personal home devices.

The reason they're not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.

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.

Supermarket employee here. We have a "fresh" fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.

Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they're lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some .... people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.

Long story short, "fresh" fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.

The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.

Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Truth

Burning waste qualifies as recycling.

I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.

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.

I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.

I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.

No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.

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.