Morromist

Good point. I'm sure a lot of the work adobe was doing between 2015-2020 involved moving to the cloud and stuff like that which I just never interacted with, and cloud stuff probably has a lot of B2B work. Plus during that time the value of their stock grew like 500% with an ATH at 700%!! They were kicking ass! Probably, to justify their growth they had all kinds of projects they were working on, some of which never saw the light of day, others which grew new parts of the company like Adobe Dimension.

Even at companies that appear super bloated I don't think people are idle, its just that mantaining stuff is a lot of work, projects get cancelled, and, like you said they do a lot of specialty work for big clients.

I'm kinda curious about this too. But then I'm always amazed at the enormous workforces these tech companies have, and I'm sure they cut them as thin as they can. Like adobe has 30,000 employees & some blogger estimated that 1/3rd of their workers are actually working on their software. I use their software sometimes and I really haven't noticed many changes to it over the years, except recently with the ai stuff. Like from 2015-2020 I can't think of any major things they added to adobe illustrator. I guess making and maintaining software is hard.

I wonder why colorado has so many red areas around hiking trails. Is it just one guy with a bad device who loves to hike or is it because there's bits of radioactive ore on the trails or something?

If you think meta is doing a great job with facebook another example could be Gamestop - which wants to be Ebay for some reason. Tesla wants to build robots now instead of making cars. Supposidly Dunkin' Donuts really wants to be a coffeeshop so they rebranded to Dunkin' and tried to shift that way.

"For most companies, trading some caution for speed is a reasonable call. Proton is a privacy company, though, and what its users pay for is the confidence that the people building it are careful. Shipping slowly and carefully is part of what they’re selling"

This is the core of it for me. There are many, maaany companies that don't want to be what they are. For example: Meta doesn't want to be a social media company - so it lets facebook rot, makes 10% of its total revenue from scammers advertising to its customers, which seem to mostly be vulnerable old people and focuses on VR and AI.

I guess Proton is having that same problem. I don't really want to be part of that though.

It looks to me like Binance will be able to scrape together enough money to make their customers whole, so your probably right.

Next time this happens to Binance though they won't have an emergency fund and possibly they'll be in debt, and that's when the users will be very screwed.

Their terrible security certainly indicates to me that future of Binance is not going to be a pretty one unless they make some enormous changes.

Yeah. AIbros and AI companies are SHOCKED that AI and datacenters are unpopular.

But guys, if your companies weren't run by psycopaths and weren't promoted by assholes who appear to be the exact same guys behind the NFT craze, (this is the future of creative expression! Don't like it? Your a luddite. Cope.) and weren't predicting horrible nightmare scenarios based on their tech maaaaaaybe people would like AI and be more interested in using it?

I personally see that generative AI is a very powerful and useful technology but I hate everyone involved in it and do not want to see them succeed because they're icky people.

Its like if the nazis had discovered how to harness atomic energy before anyone else. Fuck that.

"people want some trustworthy regulatory body"

Have you talked to Crypto-enthusiasts before? They very much don't want that.

"it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord"

Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.

The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.

Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.

Man that sucks. I gotta get my stuff out of google docs. Does anyone know of a good alternative?

I'm fine with these games being pumped out endlessly, just like flash games were. If we want to have 10,000 versions of flappy bird I guess that's fine -

But we need a way to sort them that's a bit better. Its getting tough to find quality indy games on steam now, and that's the kind of game I like to play, AAA games being too generic and dull for me usually. I feel like somehow this is just going to make it more difficult and expensive to ship a good indy game, which will result in fewer & worse indy games.

Good point. I used to think it was silly to idolize sports stars, but they worked incredibly hard with honest toil and usually a lot of study to be where they are. Heirs of big fortunes, mendacious politicians & influencers and scam artists who hit the big-time are not the same.

Influencer from ages ago with dubious claims to fame building a hardware project that never sees the light of day?

I feel like I've heard this one before. Its the story of the Intellivision Amico & Tommy Tallarico.

Weird how similar the two stories are. I wonder if there's a 3rd and a 4th computer-personality-from-the-90s-who-fails-to-build-a-crowdfunded-hardware-thing-and-lies-rediculously-about-it that I don't know about?

AI would be much easier to be optimistic about if it were in the hands of people I like and trust. Its in the hands of people who appear to be complete psychopaths instead.

Er. All the DataCenters we are building are protected from carrington/Miyake event type damage right?}

I assume the "data-centers in space" idea that company worth 2 trillion dollars is supposed to be working on has been figured out so that carrington events aren't a problem too.

The word choice example is cool. I wonder if it really works dependably. I'm sure many many exerpts in posts and books have those same 8 bits - you'd need a lot more bits - but the more you add the more strange your writing style might become.

Like it choose between "winding" and "curving" but there are many uses of curving that probably can't be replaced with "winding" like "her gently curving thighs" with "her gently winding thighs"

But I'm sure there are some intricacies I don't understand. Anyway, very cool website, thanks for sharing it~!

Thanks. These paragraphs are pretty damning:

"At one point, the processor rejected as fraudulent more than 80% of the deposits it was handling, a rate that far exceeded industry standards of roughly 1%. Polymarket employees quickly raised their concerns with Chief Executive Shayne Coplan, according to people familiar with the events.

The compliance team, those people recalled, was floored by Coplan’s response: Just keep growing and pay a fine if regulators ever find out."

At what point are you a casino and at what point are you just a utility for money laundering, insider betting, scams & fraud?

That's true. And car commercials that get people to buy fancy new cars are really well figured out and seem to seriously work. Why fix something that isn't broken?

Real estate is interesting because they seem to be really getting into using AI to stage individual houses. So I guess on the same vein maybe someone will try making an add with AI that shows some car driving down your local mainstreet or at some scenic location nearby your ip address that you might have positive associations with. Or maybe even your own home-street and parking in your driveway and you (or facebook you from 10 years ago when you had that hipster-moustashe because you haven't updated your photo) opens the door with a big smile on your face).

Seems crazy, but who knows.

I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.

Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't.

I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.

I don't belive you can patent gameplay. You can't say "I'm going to patent the idea that you all go around a board buying land and getting cash, if your player moves to someone else's land they have to pay them rent."

But you can copyright the artistic aspects of your game, like you can have the copyright to MONOPOLY and trademark the logo.

If you could patent gameplay there would be only 1 pong, which is a pretty basic idea. There are probably hundreds of pongs though.

Wow that is very very cool. Thank you very much for digging that up & sharing the link! Sometimes visuals like that really help me process information.

Definitly seeing this with video games. Especially ones that are easy to make and have generic names. I mean you could already easily clone those before, but now 10 people will easily clone them.

See this amusing reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1wfl64l/game_went...

It would be cool to see what these look like in a photo but I guess they're never empty of liquid. I wonder what happens to the oily water after we use it? Do we boil it until it evaporates?

I think what we might be moving towards is the idea that rings are kinda dumb.

Rings make our fingers less mobile, harder to clean, get in the way of our delicate hand-tasks, scratch things our hands are manipulating, yada yada.

Earings make much more sense. Or bracelets. What about Torques?

Uh... and Iran and the Straight of Hormuz?? Did you forget to mention that? Is that an election issue? And who funds the Houthis? And why would they want to close the straight to us? Is it something to do with supporting Israel? No? Ok.

I'm excited to see all the nutty takes about oil prices from the same people who don't belive in vaccines.

I kinda hope they bring back the old idea that oil is actually formed out of non-biological matter and so that means its just basically infinitly seeping up from the earth, we just have to drill a bit deeper. But I think that's a little too nerdy for them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Twitter is far from special. So I guess you're missing out on all the friends and connections and interesting conversations you have not made on Threads, Facebook, Linkedin, instagram, tiktok, reddit, bluesky, mastodon, discord & tumblr.

Also twitter is the worst of all the things I've listed.

Hmm. I wonder how long till we can implant little lights or color changers in our skin, like a moving tattoo that change color based on some wireless code we send, or special light we shine on them, so that you could essentially add or subtract facial features every couple of minutes.

I think if we could get the tech figured out it would be a big hit. People love tattoos, but the unchangability makes them disagreeable for me.

I wonder if there's a blog or something that tells the story of how good car design went off the rails. I'm pretty sure that there was a culture of design that gradually worked out what a great car is like until somewhere in the 2010s - and then got flushed down the toilet, but I don't know anything about it.

I can see how this might have happened. Tessla was a big deal and had those horrible door handles and companies probably wanted to look innovative rather than have good working designs. And physical buttons are more expensive to put in and don't look nearly as futuristic. I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!"

But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens, who cares what they do, and the car companies just threw up their hands and gave them what they wanted? I don't know. I would love to know the full story. I'm sure its documented somewhere.

Its a fun game! The only thing I would add is the ability to see the players cry and lose their quarters after you smash their ship.