Leaving the electronics at home also seems easier to explain in case you’re stopped, compared to trying to explain why you have a phone wrapped in tinfoil in your pocket.

Aren’t 90% of games just kind of trash?

Answer, per Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap”

That’s true. It’s like (old?) Twitter. Anyone could pollute and spam hashtags. Some hashtags are worse than others.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo made a lot more of those.

Only if it’s adaptive (adjusts the speed to not hit the car ahead of you) or if there are no other cars ahead of you. Regular cruise control is more of a pain than it’s worth when there are other cars ahead.

Come on, prison wine in your mouth when you wake up!

Now I make my bed every morning and I’m happier. I don’t know why.

You’re not imaging it. How Making Your Bed Can Improve Your Mood.

Completely, vastly different scenarios, so not a good comparison. Bluesky was VC-funded with $billions, headed by the same guy as Twitter originally. Mastodon was started by one guy in his spare(?) time, has never accepted VC money, and was and is specifically designed to avoid the toxic trends from Twitter.

I’m also on mastodon but I’ve had a real tough time finding my crowd there which is odd, but I think it’s because it’s too fragmented.

What have you tried so far to find your crowd on Mastodon?

This is an odd one. Genetic testing of parents and embryos to eliminate serious hereditary disease and other similar issues is already a thing. You’ll have to clarify what you mean when you say that Eugenics would be nice to have.

This level of FOMO bullshit hasn’t happened since the Dutch went bonkers over tulips.

Haha, now that’s a great comparison! I mentioned to a co-worker a couple weeks ago that we should get ready to invest in the next bubble coming up after this one pops, probably tulip bulbs (again).

Good points, thanks.

Good article, thanks! That provides better context for how the major AI companies’ finances compare with Uber’s, but I can’t think of a better example to use for a company that operated at massive losses for many years due to being propped up by investors. If you have a better example I could use, I would be glad to do it. Otherwise, if this question comes up again in the context of AI, I’ll be sure to include a link to that article.

Even if they do, Python still seems to do the job. Instagram and Threads use python for their back-ends: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

Sure, there will always be exceptions for certain use-cases, but my understanding is that PHP is faster that python in most cases. By the way, I didn’t say that to put python down, but just to point out that php wasn’t a good argument to defend python. Python itself is a good argument to defend python. See my parallel reply to yours, where I point out that Instagram and Threads both use python for their back-ends.

you can’t make a facebook with pytho with good speed

You may want to check your assumptions. Facebook’s back-end was developed with PHP, probably because it was the most popular web back-end language when it was originally developed. However, two later Meta products, Instagram and Threads, used Python for their back-end. Source: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is a useful argument because from what I understand, php is significantly faster than python.

Got it, thanks. My memory of how Uber was able to gain a foothold was a little different, but my memory of it was patchy anyway. My recollection was that they essentially said that Uber was not a taxi service. They sold it as just regular people offering to “share” a ride with someone else to an area that they were going to anyway. I have no doubt that heavy political contributions were part of their arsenal in their attack on the taxi industry and regulations, so I agree that this was government corruption. But I also recall that they also had armies of lawyers fighting at every level of government around the world to ram through the idea that this wasn’t a taxi service and shouldn’t be subject to taxi regulations. Maybe my memory is more patchy than I thought, or perhaps both things were true - government corruption and a legal war allowed them flourish.

I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.

This reminds me of a Belgian case that implicated their elites in child sexual abuse in the mid-90s, yet the alleged wider network was never fully investigated. It always surprised me that that case wasn’t referred to when the whole Epstein case blew up in the media given the parallels of the elites being involved.

WARNING: VERY DISTURBING STORY (makes Epstein look like a saint) https://torontosun.com/news/world/crime-hunter-how-high-up-did-killer-belgian-pedo-ring-go

I can kind of understand DRM in subscription streaming services. What I don’t understand at all is people paying to “buy” DRM-protected media where you don’t even get a local copy, like all major digital movie purchase platforms.