Possibly unpopular opinion but I think the Cybertruck is about as dumb-looking as most any other truck on the market. 4 big doors, more cabin than bed, trucks in general are all goofy looking parking lot crawlers nowadays

Here’s what would happen in capitalist America: entities would own those machines and use them as a means of personal enrichment, it’d displace a ton of human workers, the taxes generated from profits generated wouldn’t offset the economic impacts, and then half of the lawmakers would introduce bills that would provide lucrative incentives to those entities if they maintain a certain ratio of human workers and they’d staple a bunch of regressive crap onto it like abortion or whatever, it wouldn’t pass because the other half of lawmakers would want to tax the hell out of profits made with those machines, government would shut down 4 times a year, Jeff Bezos builds a vacation home on the moon

I’m going with 7 and 8. I’d publish a series of books on the Khitan language, get that bumped to the top of google when my name is searched, generally come off as interesting, then attempt to go viral playing shell game with randos on a boardwalk in an attempt to get noticed and land on Deal or No Deal or something like that. Then I’d snag the Guinness Book of World Records title for a couple things along the lines of shell game. Once I have a very modest amount of name recognition, I make a company selling rice cakes in such flavors as Buffalo Wing and Beef Jerky because that’s a totally untapped market, in hopes of selling out to Frito Lay or whoever

There are more than a handful of places near me that used to have decent delivery but Door Dash etc basically shut them out. They lose business by not being affiliated and not getting exposure, so they get on Door Dash and lose even more business to Door Dash, next thing you know they have no in-house delivery and all the prices on Door Dash are jacked up so they can give Door Dash their take.

More maneuverability, being able to pivot around the wheels that are first to enter the parking space, kinda like the difference in results when going nose first into a parallel parking spot vs backing in.

Might & Magic II: Gates to Another World (1988 dungeon crawler type RPG)

Diablo I

Toss up between Stardew Valley and Final Fantasy III/VI

I’ve played a load of late 80s/early 90s RPGs but right at the top is Might and Magic II

It’s a strange social experiment. Everyone is staying in and loathing it only because there hasn’t been an exodus. It’s like swinging the barn doors open and watching the cows stare longingly at the pasture in solidarity

Was this an offer or was this Elon Musk pandering to the 6 year old bully demographic? It’s hard for me to tell because it’s been 30 years since I’ve seen someone swing this much weight to try to make a dick pun at someone else’s expense

Quora did something similar to that. On mobile it’ll pester you to download the app, and on the app it’ll pester you to download an AI app, in an attempt to keep people bouncing around between those 2 apps.

Quora seems to suffer from the same issue as Reddit. AI can take a single page view and distribute the information obtained from that single page view multiple times, basically cut out the source in terms of monetization, and those 2 sites benefit the most from people using Google to find something. I think Quora’s approach is a bit more sensible than Reddit’s, basically jumping on the AI bandwagon as opposed to cutting off both AI and people using Google

I think in Reddit’s case, mostly due to the garbage search function, they’re stuck deciding between shooting themselves in the foot right now by blocking Google, or allowing generative AI to shoot them in the foot later by allowing Google to scrape user content. There will soon come a day when less people use Google to find specific information on Reddit and more people ask an AI prompt and get the same information fed to them without having to click through to Reddit.

I think the most ideal way to coexist with AI is for Reddit to pull out of search engines and make their own search engine work well, but until then they’re in a pickle

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I’m not gonna google the whole ‘GDP’ franchise/entity for hopefully obvious reasons but the ‘GDP’ franchise very well could be a verified account that creates content through exploitation and that being a very real possibility punches a hole in the effectiveness of attempting to moderate content by only allowing content derived from verified accounts. The article notes that the actual people reviewing flagged content can’t handle the sheer amount of flagged content so it’s likely they can’t handle verifying that content created by verified accounts isn’t content created through exploitation, so it’s probable once an account is verified it can just start sliding in all sorts of stuff that will go unchecked (as it apparently did in this case and others).

Beef only refers to cow and pork only refers to pig, but poultry encompasses many species of fowl, and I think that the need for distinction is what led to people generally referring to poultry by the species. If you tell someone you’re having poultry for dinner the follow-up is usually ‘what kind?’, and if beef referred to the meat of any large domestic quadriped mammal and bison were more popular, we’d probably refer to it as ‘cow’, that kind of thing.

I got hooked on Pillars of Eternity (the original vanilla game), might be worth a look if you’re into top-down ‘Baldur’s Gate’ type RPGs. Big huge map, non-linear storyline, lots of things to find. Stats, items, classes, dialogue options that are often dependent on stats and choices affect the storyline. You can add NPCs/hirelings to your party - play through by unlocking and adding the regular NPCs and wind up with a conventional group (dude with shield, healer, damage dealers), or try to get through as a Rogue with a bunch of ranged damage dealer Cipher hirelings to snipe the hard targets. Play through choosing ‘evil’ dialogue options, or try to get through solo without adding anyone else to your party (there are achievements and one of them is to run through solo, some others are playing through without main character dying, or playing through with a lot of UI targetting helpers and tooltips disabled).

My last playthrough I was running through to try to get the Triple Crown Solo achieve (solo/no dying/‘hard mode’ toggled) and had a second playthrough without ‘no dying’ toggled, so I’d crawl through the story a little on the ‘dying allowed’ file until I was confident I could advance a bit on the triple crown save, then jump to that file and advance the story. Ultimate time waster.

I’ve played through it a half a dozen times easily, each time it plays out different and I wind up discovering a lot of things I must’ve missed in prior playthroughs. It’s the kind of game you can dive into until you’re kind of bored with it, then weeks/months later you’re looking through your Steam library, glance at it, think of maybe trying to get through as a Paladin, and next thing you know you’re hours into yet another playthrough.

I think that’s their plan - everyone will be on reddit bashing F5 and trying to build protest banners and stuff, and admins will be sitting there writing over everything. They’ll get huge traffic and it won’t be a dumpster fire

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If you’re planning on replacing that painted over lock the easiest way to go about is grab a 1/16" drill bit, put a key up to it, note the orientation of the ridged part of the key, that side has the pins. Stick drill straight in, drill through the pins. Take 3/32" drill bit, aim right where you were previously aiming, drill that out. Scrape what you can out of there with a seal pick, might pull out a few springs etc, but once the pins are drilled out you can turn it with a screwdriver. Key lines up the pins so it can turn freely, but without pins it’ll turn freely, that kind of thing

It’s a strange way to go about it though - I used to have Gold and thought giving awards was kinda neat, cancelled it and got off Reddit, but if I was still on Reddit I’d probably cancel due to the change, and if I left Reddit and totally forgot to cancel Gold all the news of the change would remind me to get around to canceling it. I think it’d be better for them to either do this after IPO or at least elaborate on the future subscription structure right when they announce the change to drum up some hype.

Kinda reminds me of how Beanie Babies imploded back in the late 90s - they started retiring Beanie Babies which had collectors in a frenzy, things were awesome, then they decided to retire every Beanie Baby without announcing any future plans for the company, in hopes of really sustaining that scarcity mentality that had been going on for years, but instead people panicked at the impending collapse of interest in Beanie Babies after production was to cease, so everyone flooded the market with their collections, and a few months later they announced an entire new series of Beanie Babies, far too late, and any collectors that remained felt it was a slap in the face. If they straight up announced a new generation with different colored tags and some shit when they announced retiring every first generation Beanie Baby they probably could’ve milked it for another couple of years at least

Interest rates and inflation is probably a significant source of panic for high growth tech companies with poor earnings.

When interest rates are low, there isn’t a lot of worry about future dollars being eroded by inflation, and investors tend to pay a premium for growth and future earnings. Money is easy to borrow in that kind of environment, so a company that has lots of growth, increasing daily active users, poor earnings, but the hope of finding ways to increase earnings, that kind of company will see their valuation skyrocket and they can use that valuation to secure funding.

When it flips around and interest rates are high, inflation is high, future earnings get eroded by inflation (a dollar in 2021 was stronger than a dollar in 2023), suddenly a company that has shit earnings and huge growth is a lot less desirable compared to a company that has consistent earnings and dividends. That growth stock with shit earnings used to rely on their valuation to generate funding to power that growth, suddenly that entire siphon gets broken, their valuation falls from the sky into reasonable territory, money is hard to borrow, and they’re stuck trying to stay afloat mostly with their shitty earnings.

After the great recession, tech was a very dirty word. We’re talking years after the great recession, 2012-2014 even. People didn’t want to invest in companies that didn’t make any money. 2020-2021, pandemic, lockdowns, historically low interest rates, all that, money was so easy to borrow and growth was so huge from people being stuck indoors that a lot of tech companies with shitty earnings had such insane growth metrics like daily active users that these companies went to the moon. Twilio, TWLO for example, quadrupled from pre-pandemic highs. 2022-2023, inflation becomes a very real thing and things are opening up again, all those metrics drop to normal levels, money is harder to borrow, future dollars getting eroded, growth tech gets crushed, TWLO is suddenly trading at levels lower than pre-pandemic (lost 80% of its value from pandemic highs).

We’re seeing a lot of ‘internet’ type tech companies go from boom to bust, and now they need to do whatever they can to drum up money the good old fashioned way - from generating income as opposed to securing funding through growth (debt).

Not only stuff like Twitter and Reddit, but Netflix cracking down on account sharing. A couple years back Netflix viewed account sharing less as a loss of revenue and more as an ‘unauthorized permanent trial’, hopefully some bandits eventually get their own account for the sake of convenience… But nowadays Netflix needs to think shorter-term and behave a bit more self-sufficiently, so they’re starting to take a more direct approach to compel people to obtain subscriptions.

Something like gfycat, when money is easy to borrow and inflation is low, investors will line up to pile in even if there is practically no revenue, because eventually they might monetize it and become wildly profitable… But in this environment nobody wants to touch something like that, so a zero revenue entity either scrambles for profitability or they simply dry out

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