“I just made the most expensive purchase of my life and I can’t figure out why I am living paycheck to paycheck.”

Except that definition had an absence of evidence.

Came to make sure someone had posted Pratchett.

I think it particularly suits OP as the prose is astoundingly good. I’d never been impressed by sentence structure until reading Pratchett.

Also, for someone into non-fiction, there’s so much real world brilliance that it crosses over pretty well. (Sociology, science, politics, religion, damnit, everything. The whole human experience can be found in Pratchett’s writing.)

It’d be weird after half a century of tv, if suddenly in the 2010s it somehow escalated all the self harm/suicide stats.

This might help you understand the issue with reddit, which apparently has yet to ever cover its operating costs within a year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2024/02/26/reddits-ipo-filing-shows-lots-of-losses-after-nearly-20-years/

Kind of eye opening, even if you vaguely understood the situation beforehand.

I think you’re misunderstanding my point.

You can still use reddit for free, that won’t change. That is because to reddit you are cattle, the product, what is being sold.

And as long as you are a product, reddit is going to extract as much value from you as they can. It’s why their valuation is in the billions, you are lucrative cattle. And qs someone who has wrangled that cattle, spez is taking his cut.

These are sites premised on free labour but the end user pays nothing to enjoy the site.

As much value is created by those volunteers, the operating/dev costs are very real and can’t just be hand waved away.

Probably very unpopular thoughts but…

A) How many of us wouldn’t angle for an almost 200 million dollar payout? Seriously? All of us are too good for that?

B) Social media like reddit is basically free for users and costs way more than most of us could afford to run. We probably need to figure out some middle ground where people expect to pay a few pennies for something they use for hours a day. Unfortunately, advertising etc has conditioned/conned people into thinking everything should be “free” and with ads.

It’s a mystery! I’ll never understand why the week after yet another price hike, I quit because of the price hike. I guess I just act randomly in response to price hikes.

Neat! I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll try moving my cat’s less used scratching post to a better spot…!

If you buy a car and don’t use it, you’re in much the same situation. You have an expensive thing gaining you no value. At worst that money could be in your savings. I imagine a company could find more productive uses for that capital. (A decent chunk of capital mind you, Google paid about 10% of its annual profit for a pair of offices in 2018.)

Sure, you could sell the car but you’re going to take a loss as office vacancy rates are at what I assume are historic highs (in Canada it’s about 17%).

The more conspiratorial minded may also point out that most CEO level folks or board members are pretty likely to have a lot of their wealth tied into the market, a not insubstantial sum of which is tied to corporate real estate. A significant disruption there could cost those folks and their friends heavily. It’s a little conspiracy minded for me but also not so much so that it feels ludicrous.

What? Why?

Ahaha, dang I got so excited before google pointed out I’m an idiot and meant season 4. (But on the other hand, did find out it was renewed for a 4th, so that’s groovy!)

I think of it like those people are subsidizing my free content.

If no one subscribes, we don’t get Love, Death and Robots season 3 4!

robots and ai are not and will never be conscious

Bold claim. I’d agree LLMs are not conscious but to say never? Like I said, bold.

I stronglt recommend reading some Daniel Dennett.

CS50 covers pointers, objects, classes etc and will give you a solid foundation. Fully recommend though, fair warning, it’s challenging. Tideman nearly crushed my soul.

Well, that was an intriguing sentence. I’ll have to check this out.

Ha, completely forgot about this.

You should read that article carefully though. They even outline why this is a money maker later:

You might be wondering, how did I get $1650 in total revenue from a $1500 sale? Well, it’s true, because you were able to take 10% of the gift card in breakage income, and on an individual order/customer it can look funny, but on the whole, with your P&L, it’ll be offset by another gift card purchase not being used and money that was “indefinitely deferred!”

So, uhhh, I guess I’d ask, why would you comment on something about which you know nothing?

The inspiration is just having programmed guard rails, not the actual three laws.

Yeah but not at the same quality. And my preferred game is hockey where high quality really makes a difference.