I work in government and have the ability to fuck up people’s lives with 3 mouse clicks. But that doesn’t mean I have the authority to do it.

Wasn’t Epstein’s email address jeevacation at gmail?

SpaceX is not actually supposed to even have direct control over Starshield. It uses Starlink infrastructure, but is a military application that is supposed to be under the control of the federal government.

SpaceX shouldn’t have the option to pitch different plans.

The democratic House resolution is basically an opinion letter. It’s no different than when they pass a resolution declaring that Christmas is a special time of year.

They’ll make good data centers. As in - data storage and networking infrastructure, not the pollution and hallucination machines.

If you’re installing a game through Steam, you’re dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn’t matter how “indie” your game is.

Their assholery isn’t customer-facing, but it ABSOLUTELY impacts customers.

His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.

No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn’t even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It’s unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn’t been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I’ll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.

If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to play it because I didn’t have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.

Public trading results in short-sighted planning because investors can always buy/sell stocks and move on to whatever is profitable moment to moment. Private companies plan longer term because the investors benefit from the company’s long-term success. Their profits come from the company’s profits, not the value of the stock.

Make no mistake, Valve is in it for the money. They’re as greedy as anyone. But they operate under a corporate structure that values the long-term viability of its platform.

And they’re still assholes. They are all about lootboxes, DLC, etc. And they take a massive cut of sales. Do Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo do the same? Yeah - but they also provide the hardware platforms. Does Best Buy and Gamestop charge similar fees? Yeah - but they have the overhead of the retail locations. Steam makes stupid money off a download platform and game launcher.

Gabe is a billionaire yacht collector, not your friend. His greed just takes a longer view than that of someone looking to sell their shares from minute to minute.

Real answer: It’s not that knowledge is itself evil. It’s that by obtaining the knowledge of good and evil, mankind was responsible for its actions.

The idea is that animals aren’t capable of being good or evil because they have no knowledge of the concept. Whereas humanity’s knowledge and understanding means we’re aware of the morality of our actions.

To put it in a more contemporary, non-religous context - you can’t blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes for the environmental damage they cause because they aren’t aware of their impact. Humans are aware, and should be held to account for their actions.

That’s how seasons work, ideally.

People should have been imprisoned over the Sony rootkit scandal.

For those who don’t know - their music CDs had malware built in that automatically installed itself on PCs without prompting or notification that gave unsecured root access to any PC through a hidden service that couldn’t be detected or disabled from within Windows. It was as bad as bad gets. There was no hidden EULA or anything. They just straight-up installed viruses on millions of PCs that opened the door for other malware to install itself at the root level where it couldn’t be detected.

Sony should have been shut down entirely over it.

You can still target ads based on location, but you do it through targeted content like they used to, which also g9ves us more diverse content.

When a local business wanted to put an ad out and didn’t want to go nationwide, they’d advertise in the local paper. Now they just pay Google to target people, which is why 90% of local news has died.

TV and radio managed just fine for years without targeted ads. They targeted the ads based on the content. Saturday morning cartoons advertised toys and ceral. Daytime TV advertises medicare advantage plans for retirees. Country radio advertises white hoods or whatever.

Meanwhile, subscription services without ads also made money.

Targeted ads were never necessary. Outlaw them and the internet and media companies won’t disappear.

A lot of their revenue is also investment from hardware and software vendors that are using the revenue from the AI companies for those investments.

It’s like the Enron scheme, but instead of one company inventing fake companies to move money around to increase revenue and drive up prices to hide the fact they’re hemorrhaging money while the C-suite tries to divest their own money from the company, it’s multiple companies working together to move money around to increase revenue and drive up prices to hide the fact they’re hemorrhaging money while the major investors try to find a way to cash out.

Anthropic is anxious to do their IPO because they know their business model is fucked, and their shareholders want out.

I like the wireless. I just want more premium ones that have a cord between them. My old Jaybird X3s were spectacular, but they became a budget brand making cheapo devices.

I also miss having buttons instead of touch controls. The touch controls get triggered by getting wet.

I want them to bring back more buds that are connected to each other, so it’s harder to lose them.

While true - this isn’t just about Brazil. It’s an Argentine MAGA broker who tried to kill a Bolivian lawyer while coordinating with an American company to boost Brazilian Nazis and damage the Mexican president’s administration.

It’s bad.

I don’t think they will this time either, but I also expect this to be a worse crash by a LOT.

Half the tech industry has basically turned into an Enron here (circular investments with each other to create the illusion of income), while the component crunch it’s caused is hurting everyone else.

This is poised to be the biggest financial crash in history. These assholes are fighting every day to push the crash further away so they can divest themselves quietly or make ot to an IPO, and in doing so are making the upcoming disaster much worse.

And so much investment has been dumped into this scheme I don’t know how our economic system.will survive. Unchecked capitalism needs to go away, but having it collapse all at once is gonna be really, really bad.