Have company that completely depends on people using their brains to solve problems.

Give these people free stimulants for years so you can extract extra value out of their brains.

Stop giving them stimulants.

Brain workers are now cranky and stimulant deprived. Surely this will make them more effective…

Give brain workers stimulants again, because fucking obviously.

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

Board of Directors shocked, absolutely shocked, that they were supposed to be directing the company. When reached for comment several wealthy looking people were seen with dictionaries in hand looking up the word “director” looking absolutely aghast

Don’t want to be involved with politicians, stay out of politics.

Don’t want to be involved with the police, follow the laws. Absolutely do not get involved with sovereign citizen bullshit, it is based on nothing and has never worked in a court of law. I mention this because you seem like someone that might be attracted to that, and there’s nothing that’s going to get Johnny Law up in your shit faster than some bullshit “I’m just traveling in a private conveyance license plate I bought off Facebook marketplace.”

Don’t want to be involved with the underworld… again just follow the law. Mobsters and human traffickers aren’t heading into the suburbs to recruit new operatives.

Don’t want to be involved with the elite, kinda shit out of luck, they own everything and will squeeze you with all kinds of predatory capitalism. This means you get to pick between hundreds of brands all produced by 3 mega corporations, not that Elon musk rapes your kid in the basement. So basically the same advice, don’t go to billionaire cocktail parties (don’t worry they aren’t inviting you) and you’ll be fine.

You live in the statistically safest time for a human being to live if you are in the USA. If you consume a bunch of media you’ll get a different impression, but you literally could not pick a safer time to be alive if you are some upper middle class nobody.

tl;dr - No one gives one wet shit about you, my dude. You aren’t the main character, there isn’t a cabal of politicians and elites and cops and billionaires plotting your destruction. If you are feeling paranoid go seek out mental health support, and do it from a doctor, not Lemmy.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

Really enjoyed Farcry 5 but Farcry 6 was ok gameplay wise but the story was really underwhelming especially with the amazing talent they got in Giancarlo Esposito.

The real problem with Ubisoft games is that they are all 95% reskins. If you’ve played one farcry game you’ve played most of every farcry game, same with assassins creed, etc.

Now those games often end up having relatively fun mechanics so when another farcry comes out I’ll still play it because it’s a fun game to me.

I do wonder how much they are just hitting a saturation point where the same couple games reskinned over and over are just underwhelming

Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works

Relevant section of the user manual

There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8:

1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users

Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.

Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command

Relevant section of the user manual

This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you

I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

There’s a weird feel from this comic for me. I’m glad that these two people could have an amicable divorce. I think the thing that feels off is how casual the decision feels in the comic. I suspect this might be why some people are having a negative reaction as well.

Even if you think marriage isn’t forever, it’s still a promise to love and care about someone, to cherish them and share your life with them. I think if you’ve been in a marriage and seen your loved one through hard times together, this comic just feels capricious. A discussion about ending such an important component of your life happening in the span of two panels in a car ride just feels abrupt and unserious.

I imagine in real life the conversation was more serious and the impact of changing you relationship from one of romantic love to friendship weighed on both parties more than the comic has space to show.

If you’ve loved and supported your spouse through difficult and unexpected change or been the recipient of that love and support, this comic can feel dismissive. If you’ve gone through the heartache of losing your special person, even if they are still a part of your life, the celebratory tone sounds wrong.

I am happy that they can separate and still care about each other, but I also understand why people feel like something is wrong about the comic.

I remember back in 2015 people were saying that trump was saying that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it. I thought, “I wonder what he actually said that got chopped up and editorialized this way?”

Every day after that has been me realizing that if you dig any deeper on the stupid shit it just gets stupider. We will kill off the planet because one time trump bought a cheap led bulb that didn’t flatter his natural orange glow quite enough and now we can only have coal fired power plants. Every stupid thing he says has an even stupider story behind it which itself probably has an even stupider story behind that and on and on. It’s truly astounding

Or that people prone to fear of others would self select living in areas that provide them with fewer others

Rush Week might be a good match

Eventually they do need to pay back the loan, the low interest rates just make it so that they can choose to sell their stocks in the most favorable way.

This is why it makes sense for the financial institute to give out the loan in the first place.

So here’s the scenario. Let’s say you wake up tomorrow and somehow find yourself with $200M worth of stock. You are now “worth” $200M so you’d like to start living like it! You want to go buy a mansion and a nice new car and a private chef. Problem is, none of those people take stock, they all want money.

Goldman Sachs goes, “hey, I’ll loan you the money really cheap, you have to pay me back with interest, but since you have $200M in stock you can sell some of that later and pay me back”

This is great for you because you get to enjoy the mansion and new car and private chef right now. If you sold the stock right now you’d get taxed as if it were income at 38% but if you hold the stock for a few years when you sell it it will be considered capital gains and only taxed at 10% (or 15%, whichever the rate is). In addition, you don’t have to go to the stock market and sell for whatever they want right now, you can wait until the value of your stock is really high and selling is very advantageous for you.

So you do have to pay back the money, but this is still a really sweet deal because you can enjoy all the nice things right now and you get to avoid that extra ~30% you would pay in taxes if you sold it right now.

As long as the amount you saved in taxes outweighs the amount you pay in interest, this is a great deal for you. And for the financial institute it’s low risk (they extended you $10M backed by $200M in assets) and when you repay they make back enough in interest to make it worthwhile.

You get more money in your pocket, the bank gets more money in its pocket, from their point of view this was a win win. The losers are the market suffering a higher price for the stock because the supply was artificially constrained by you having access to this credit (otherwise you’d have sold shares to buy a mansion and nice car and private chef) and the taxpayer who was to shoulder a heavy tax burden because you converted your income into capital gains.

The one thing that definitely isn’t happening is Bezos or Musk or any of these other “they are only rich on paper” people clipping coupons to make ends meet. They live like rich people because the have access to plenty of money secured by their less liquid assets

For anyone that’s fallen for the “{wealthy person} doesn’t actually have ${huge number} because it’s stock” thing, here’s how it works.

1. Wealthy people with lots of stock get access to very, very cheap credit. Not credit cards like the plebs get with a 23% APR, multi million dollar lines of credit from places like Goldman Sachs with hyper low interest rates.
2. Wealthy people use that credit to live indistinguishably from a person that actually has the vast wealth that they have access to. Spez might “only” make $400k but if he has access to $50M in cheap credit it spends all the same.
3. Wealthy people enjoying their access to cheap credit which spends the same as income then get to dodge income taxes and instead use the more favorable capital gains tax rates.
4. As a fun bonus, they also get to go “you morons I don’t have $200M that’s all just on paper, I only pay myself $10 a year because I’m a man of the people. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get on this private jet”

You might be wondering, why do they get this cheap credit? Because it’s a very safe bet for the financial institute, they are acting as a sort of time arbitrage mechanism for the person they are extending credit to. Since they perform this function they can be relatively assured that this will allow their client to sell their stocks, not because they have to cover expenses, but because capital gains protections and the market is favorable. It also aids in fostering a positive relationship with someone with a lot of wealth which is something financial institutes have an interest in doing.

All the actors are doing what’s in their rational self-interest. The end result is that Spez can access a large part of that $200M as liquid cash right now through credit with one hand and with the other wave you off and say “those are stocks I actually only got paid $400k”