𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

  • 1 Post
  • 7 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2025
  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@piefed.worldOPtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Have you ever hired someone just because they were more attractive?English
    1·
    16 hours ago
    It is a conundrum with retail. In a bike shop environment, women are only 5%-15% of the market in objective unbiased total, (based on numbers from the largest wholesale distributors).

    Women will buy from women in a bike shop but not from men in most cases. Likewise, the demographic of male cyclists that shop in brick and mortar retail stores, is very partial to female staff. Therefore, by the back office numbers, a girl is statistically far more valuable for shop staff in almost every circumstance regardless of personality, intelligence, or skill. I would like to say otherwise, but the numbers in the shops with ~60 employees across 3 stores and years pointed otherwise. The thing that really sucks is how women’s retail stuff for cycling is always a loss or breaks even at best. The lack of volume leads to major issues with overburden inventory over time. Overburden is why most nice shops fail within a decade or are a hobby business with someone willing to inject considerable funds in the $100k-$300k range to bail out the shop about once a decade. Every time a wrong part is ordered or a poorly planned size run of clothing sells lopsided, or some niche lineup of bikes is suddenly unpopular, it chips away at cash flow and eventually strangles the business slowly from the back office causing a default on a major distributor’s credit account. This causes all the mainline distributors to pull the shop’s credit for cash only access. Next preseason order cycle, the margins will be garbage and no popular products are accessible. No shop will last more than 2 years like this.

    So like, I hired any female cyclist at a much higher starting wage. I was the Buyer and back office manager for the chain. From my perspective, I viewed women on staff like a life vest and triage. My job was to keep the thing alive for as long as possible without losing access to credit. Women were an opportunity to triage a large open wound where my alternative is to give up entirely on 5%-15% of the entire market.

    Maybe that is an interesting counter perspective. I only cared about the unbiased numbers. In most instances I rarely interacted with these people. And at work, I have a strict policy of ‘never shitting in my own back yard.’

  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@piefed.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's the best paid search engine?English
    2·
    2 days ago

    Original comment said in good faith, but from sketchy long term memory of stuff I’ve come across. It seems like it was in a Lex Friedman or similar podcast at some point, but from some time in the last 3-10 years. I may have conflated or misunderstood, as I am not experienced with such complexity. I seem to recall it coming up around the time several astronomers were speaking publicly about issues with processing large amounts of data and soliciting solutions. I just recall wondering why search started to suck around 2017, and putting the pieces together when I heard this. Now, in retrospect, it seems much of the changes were also adversarial for rival AI training after the Transformers paper. At least, looking at how search results are salted now, and the way images are selected for search is absolutely adversarial for AI training datasets… but that is all I know, and should be taken as friendly neighborhood water cooler talk, always with the best of intentions.

  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@piefed.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's the best paid search engine?English
    82·
    2 days ago

    There are only 2 relevant web crawlers; Google’s and Microsoft’s. All queries from every search engine goes through these two crawlers either directly or through a middle layer of obfuscation.

    The issue is that the internet is too large to index. This has been a known emerging issue for a long time. This is the real reason search sucks. It is not deterministic because it cannot be, but therein lies the issue. Without deterministic unbiased information, democracy is dead. And so search sucks. No one has been able to find a solution for efficient access to enormous databases like this except through the methodologies behind AI. At least not for real time search queries.