Source: you made it up
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It's classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.
That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.
I get that it's an infinite energy generator, not an infinite electrical generator. But you might as well finish the job and add the part where the energy heats water into steam for the turbines, just to be thorough.
Firewood banks are a fantastic tool for teaching rural people that socialism is actually fucking great.
Assuming that ALL rural people voted a singular way and have singular beliefs is incredibly prejudiced and dangerous. I live in a northeastern US city that has been solidly blue for my entire life, but I still see plenty of houses and cars with Trump merch. Heck, a lot of rural people have been disenfranchised by voter suppression tactics. A lot of these people are illiterate. They're victims.
And where do you draw the line? This inevitably leads to "purity testing" all of the "blue" folks to figure out just how "blue" they are, and that's kind of gross.
These people are my neighbors and fellow humans. Give them their fucking firewood, food stamps, libraries, healthcare, and all of the other material support any reasonable government should in 2025.
The real enemies are the wealthy elites. The fossil fuel magnates, the wealthy elites who own the land and control the lumber. They absolutely love that you're picking on a bunch of uneducated and powerless poor people and drawing attention away from the people with power who made the system this way.
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Ever since I quit drinking three years ago, I've gotten a good night's sleep a handful of times
Alcohol is pretty terrible for sleeping.
There may of course be psychological reasons alcohol can help you get to sleep. And for alcoholics I would imagine the withdrawal symptoms may interfere with sleep. We are all balancing the needs of our bodies and minds to cope with this cruel world and I'm not judging, but the science says there are benefits to sleeping without alcohol.
It's not an open market when there are only 3 companies that manufacture RAM, and they already have a history of being punished for illegally colluding with each other.
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StumbleUpon was what I personally cite as the peak of the internet.
It was a website where you made an account and selected what categories of things you were interested in. Then click the button and it would take you to a random piece of content on the internet related to that. I remember thinking at the time it was like Pandora, but for the whole internet rather than just music. Eventually it got bought and shut down.
Mint would be another one. A free, ad-deiven website with optional premoun features that allowed you to easily link all of your financial accounts. It would automatically categorize transactions, but you could manually change them and change the categories themselves. It worked great back in the early 2010's. Then Intuit bought it and it slowly got shittier. They reduced the visualization options. Eventually a few years ago they shut it down to try to get people to move to a different, paid product. Personally I moved to HomeBank, an open-source self-hosted solution. But it means I need to manually import everything.
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I can build a better PC for less money
Maybe we should wait until we know the price before making memes about this?
Especially with how RAM and SSD prices are increasing. A huge part of the Steam Deck's success was because they partnered with AMD to get a great price-to-performance APU in a market where GPU prices were inflated by crypto, and now AI.
Of course if RAM and SSD prices get too high these machines might get bought up and scrapped for parts anyways, but let's at least see if that happens first.
Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I've never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he's not particularly qualified on this subject.
The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he's not an AI or finance expert and doesn't specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.
Something along the lines of "well I actually don't like anime!". And started talking about how people expect him to be an anime fan, and how he lived in Japan for a while and liked manga a lot but not so much anime.
It was a a party with a lot of "alternative" people, most of whom probably would just say "yeah I like anime". I think the guy was expecting me to say that so that he could that he could then subvert expectations, but my more neutral response kind of derailed things.
- Bigotry and prejudice is always bad, even if it's not against a "protected class". Hating on white people, straight people, cis people, men, or anyone else for the way they were born, what their ancestors did makes the world a worse place. Heck, "white" itself is a nebulous concept that changes over time and is different depending on which racist you're talking to. Just because someone resembles your oppressor does not make them your enemy.
- Kind of related, but I don't broadly judge categories of things. I was at a party recently and someone asked me if I liked anime, and I responded that I like some anime. Most of it I don't like, but that's not specific to anime. In my experience, roughly 80-90% of all media is somewhere between "garbage" and "mediocre", and it's the 10-20% at the top that I look for. A lot of my favorite bands happen to be metal, but I'm not going to like every band that uses distorted guitars.
Perhaps another way of phrasing it is that I usually find that the parameters which define genre are often separate from the parameters that determine my personal enjoyment.
My theory is that most people are more concerned with the social groups around media than the media itself.
Traffic signals and traffic cameras are two entirely different things.
I would expand that to body modification in general. Tattoos, piercings, hair loss/removal treatments, shoe lifts, fake nails. Heck, you could even expand it to clothing and fashion.
For me it comes down to cost-benefit analysis. For me personally I find it pretty easy to change my mind, so that's usually "cheaper" than trying to change my body. Or you could say that I don't see much "benefit" to such changes to my appearance. To let go of my desire to appear a certain way, to stop caring about how others see me. Some might call that cis privelege, but I would argue it's something most cis people (at least in the US) struggle with too.
With the people I hang out with, i'm usually the only one without piercings to tattoos. Often I'm the only person with naturally colored hair (I do hope I go grey before losing it because it would be pretty cool to look like an old wizard, but if I lose my hair first I'll just embrace it).
At the same time, you could extend the conversation the other way to things like prosthetics. I just saw a meme on Lemmy yesterday about a closeted trans person who had a car accident with a moose and needed extensive surgery afterwords. So rather than restoring how they used to look they took the opportunity to fully transition. From my perspective, the opportunity cost of transitioning was lowered in that case.
I want to see humanity continue to pursue technology to reduce these costs though. People have been writing fiction for centuries about gender-swapping, even just for a couple of days. If there really was some magical pill that could swap your gender for a day or two, or was easily reversible, or if you could just transfer your brain between artificial bodies, I could see that leading to a lot more empathy in the world.
The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?
I visited Boston 2 months ago for a wedding. Spent almost a whole week making a vacation of it with my wife. Can confirm all of this is accurate.
And yes, I went to the famous Italian district in the North End. It was way overpriced and it was fine but not particularly memorable. Just generic american-italian fare you can find in any city in America. The only notable food I had was the absolute worst Pad Thai I've ever had in my life.
I'm a white guy who has lived my whole life in the northeast US, and even I was shocked at the lack of spices or flavor in everything. Even my Dunkin Donuts coffee seemed blander than how it was at home.
Well, I did get some edibles from the dispensary which included some incredible white chocolate with espresso beans. Not sure if I would count that as "food" though.
If you do have to eat in downtown Boston I would recommend the South Street Diner. The food itself was just the stuff you would expect from any diner in America, but it was executed well and almost reasonably priced.
If only it were possible to transport humans and goods without a network of cameras invading everyone's privacy.
If only that was the natural state of the world for more of human history until just a few years ago.
Don't get me wrong: I hate how consumerist Christmas is and how stores have started stocking Christmas decorations in September.
BUT
Living in America, the cutoff is Thanksgiving. Which does indeed cede part of the end of November to Christmas.
However, Halloween has encroached forward, pushed on by the goths. What started as merely Tim Burton fans has evolved. Krampusnacht has started to catch on as a more horror-themed holiday. So a lot of our Halloween decorations just stay up. And there's no point on making a trip to the attic just to put stuff away so they stay out until the end of December with everything else.
Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, "no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!" By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.
Hank Green isn't a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He's just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a "bubble" for much longer.
I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.
I don't like giving credit to "trading algorithms" for things that humans figured out a long time ago.
Such as? They didn't invent micro transactions or DLC or DRM. They allow publishers to do that on their platform but do a better job than any other store at communicating those things to consumers.
The reason Valve gets glazed is that they BALANCE the needs of their stakeholders better.
Microsoft has been laying off workers and increasing the price of their crappy hardware no one wants, trying to push Xbox Live so that consumers own nothing and just rent acces to games. They buy up studios and force them to make soulless games stuffed with micro transactions or just close them down. Even the famous horse armor debacle from Bethesda was because Microsoft pushed them to do it (the game was a timed exclusive for Windows and Xbox).
Nintendo insists on charging ridiculous amount for underpowered hardware, forcing their own proprietary cartridge formats that don't even have the game on it. Lockig. Their old library in a disney-like vault of either not publishing those old games, locking them behind a subscription, or charging ridiculous prices for ports to modern hardware. Refusing to publish on PC. To their credit, Nintendo seems to treat their employees well at least, with the executives taking significant pay cuts during the WiiU era in order to avoid layoffs or pay cuts for the rest of their employees.
Sony is... Mostly fine. They have had some layoffs, but nowhere near Xbox levels. Their hardware is expensive, but it's also the most capable (maybe some debate with the Series X but that's also more expensive)- they're just targeting a premium demographic and leaving the budget tier behind. Sony has been dominating hardware sales this generation simply by sucking less than the others. The biggest criticism is probably that all of their 1st party games are starting to feel the same: 3rd person over-the-shoulder cinematic experiences. It's also fair to criticize failed projects like PSVR2 I suppose, but I would say part of why that failed is that Sony didn't try to shove it down consumers throats and instead just made it available and let consumers tell them how much they want it (which was not much). In contrast to things like the Xbox Kinect or the WiiU Gamepad.
Epic games... I mean Tim Sweeney is just plain shitty. Their whole business model is to throw Fortnight money at everything and hope. Throw money at publishers for times exclusivity. Throw free games at consumers hoping they don't realize how terrible the platform is. Taking a lower cut of sales than Steam or physical retailers do is cool for the publishers, but that isn't enough to make me want to set up an account.
GOG is a fine niche. On paper I love the idea of changing the way games are sold so that people own games. Except you still don't. The publishers are still selling the exact same licenses they sell everywhere else. I can't copy or modify or re-sell my games, I can't leave them to my estate when I die, so I don't call that 'owning' my games. It's really hard to take them seriously when they don't support Linux too. Plus the launcher and the platform just don't have the features that Steam does.
In contrast... Searching for Valve layoffs on the internet I can only see that they laid off 13 people back in 2019. The Steam Store does a better job than any other of providing information for consumers to make informed decisions: what control options are available, what DRM and EULA's the publisher requires, what DLC and bundles are available, the use of AI in game creation, and a ton more. And as for price... You might occasionally find games cheaper elsewhere, but it's rare. Then the hardware... The Steam Deck is the best value anyone has put out since... Honestly I can't think of a better value in history. It's better than the PS2, the Wii, the GBA, everything else i can think of. The Valve Index was a competitive high-end VR system and the first steam controller has issues, but filled a specific niche and was a cult classic. The new hardware looks like it will be great, though of course we will need to see how it goes and what the prices are.
I would love it if Valve could stand up to payment processors to fight censorship, but I also understand they're over a barrel there. I would love it if Valve could convince publishers to get rid of DRM but that does not seem like a reasonable expectation (especially as long as people are willing to buy games with DRM anyways- I blame consumers for not caring more than I blame Valve). I might even be cool if Valve reduced their cut, but... Is that really what the games industry needs?
It's really bizarre to me how on Lemmy any time Valve does anything good there's a bunch of comments chastising people for "glazing" them or being "fanboys". Sometimes companies (especially ones that are not publicly traded) stumble into making decent decisions. There are still a few corporations that act like they are in mid-stage capitalism instead of late-stage capitalism. Costco would be another example in the grocery industry- I don't love them or everything they do, but they at least make some effort to balance the interest of ownership, employees, consumers, and suppliers so that they can sustain long-term business relationships instead of chasing quarterly profit increases.