There’s no reason for them to be digital at all. The UK has secure elections with hand-counting paper ballots.

I wonder what kind of conversations Vance had with his wife about these kinds of things? Or his children…

Well, it was found that water pools in the chassis of the Cybertruck, corroding it. They dealt with this by telling consumers not to get it wet and make taking it through a carwash void the warrantee.

Also “LGB drop the T”. Once all the trans people are in camps, who do you think they’re coming for next, LGBs?

It makes more sense when you realise that it’s about oppression, power, and creating scapegoats. Hitler’s closest allies were the not-exactly-Aryan Japanese.

And it’s not like they won’t all turn on each other eventually, anyway. So why not have some strange bedfellows along the way?

This was the big thing for the sequel for me - it kind of just treated it as a fantasy world. An actually interesting film would have been written with the question of how computers have changed in mind. What would the concept of Tron look like in the modern age?

Ralph Breaks The Internet is actually s better sequel…

At the moment OpenAI can’t pay back anything, becuase they’re hemmorhaging money. Losing billions a year. And there’s no path to profitability.

That’s why they make investors confirm that they’re considering their investments a donation. That’s also why it’s unusual.

It’s not unusual for the opening phases of big tech companies to be “operate at a massive loss until the competition has gone out of business”, as companies like Netflix and Uber can attest, but it is unusual for that to be done where the investors aren’t expecting to make a profit.

VCs typically want a return on their investments

Not framed like that. You have to acknowledge that investments can depreciate rather than appreciate and that you may lose your money, sure. That’s very different to saying that you acknowledge that you probably will lose your money and that you consider your investment a donation.

FWIW, part of the OpenAI investment process is signing something to say that you understand that you’re unlikely to get any return on your investment and that you consider it more akin to a donation

I was just scrolling down to see if anybody had mentioned it

It’s not just that. Employers think you’re “getting away” with…something…if you can manage to be productive while having something which advantages you.

For one example, several firms - including Microsoft - have conducted experiments where they move an office to a 4 day, 32 hour week while paying people the same. They unfailingly found that productivity either stayed the same or went up. So, at the end of the experiment they…went back to a 5 day week. Because otherwise people are just getting an extra day off, aren’t they? When they “should” be working.

Even if productivity went up and it was better for the company and for the workers, it was still ultimately seen as a bad thing because the workers were better off.

Another example: at a previous job I had we got an hour’s break over the course of the day. 15 minutes 2 hours after start, 30 minutes 4 hours after start, and another 15 minutes 6 hours after start. On a Friday, however, the workday was 7 hours rather than 8. This meant that an hour before leaving people would have a 15 minute break, and then it wasn’t worth actually starting anything because before you’d have a chance to get into it you’d be getting ready to go home. So the workers went to management and said “let’s work through the last break on a Friday and go home 15 minutes early instead”. Management agreed, productivity went up, and everybody was happy at getting off an extra 15 minutes early.

Then the old upper manager was fired and a new one took their place, and this arrangement was deemed to be “getting away with it”. Taking a final break & going home later was mandated. Suddenly none of the management who had agreed it had anything to do with the initial decision and they’d always thought it was a bad idea.

So the workers were unhappy because they had a longer workday, less work got done because everybody was unproductive after break, and the company was getting less value for money becuse they were paying people the same amount for less work. But they thought it was a better situation because people were physically in the building for an extra 15 minutes, and therefore not “getting away with it”.

There’s very often a mindset in management that employees are naughty children, and that strict rules must be good just because they’re rules, rather than because they actually lead to better outcomes for the company.

You probably haven’t. Spiders can trap air with the hair on their skin and can survive a trip down the drain. They’ll probably climb back up again once it’s dry.

Yup. I don’t like having spiders in the house. Know what i like having in the house less? Flies. So the spiders stay.

I didn’t stop and verify, but I’ve literally just seen a post on here which says that Israel has violated the ceasefire 3 days running at this point.

There was a story a couple of years ago about corporations trying to get people to work unpaid hours while working from home. The logic, such as it was, went like this: if you live an hour’s commute away from work and you work an 8-hour day, then you’re actually spending 10 hours of your day dedicated to work because the travel time isn’t time you get to do whatever you want in. Therefore, since you’re used to work taking up 10 hours of your time, you should also spend 10 hours working while working from home.

It’s astonishing, really.

A lot of these replies are framing it as meeting someone out in the wild, but that’s not how most modern dating works. So, another reason why the pool is limited is that s lot of celebrities these days are on the dating app Raya.

There’s a strict application process where you have to demonstrate that you’re financially successful, physically attractive, and in some way notable. It started off exclusively as celebrities but now you can also get in if you’re, say, a c-suite executive at a large firm or own your own high-value tech firm. You also pretty much have to live in LA or New York if you want to match with anybody.

There are all kinds of rules, too. You’ll get banned for like if you take a screenshot in the app or publicly identify someone that you know is on the app. You’ll even get banned for publicly mentioning that the app exists too often.

Because of that it’s difficult to confirm who is on it, but it’s rumoured to be incredibly popular amongst celebrities. Keirnan Shipka in an interview once declared herself to be “Raya for life”.

These days most people meet people through dating apps. And the app that most celebrities are on is deliberately very exclusive, to the point where a middle-class person absolutely would not be allowed on it.

Yeah, we can basically just put every speedrunner of every game into this topic. “Man, I love this game so much. Let’s see if I can break it so I can 100% it in under a minute!”/“This is the best shooter ever made! Let’s see if I can complete it without hurting anybody!”

There seems to be one or two Sims channels on YouTube where the people running the channel have little or no interest in playing the game and instead just build and furnish houses/shops.

Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.

There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.

A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.

Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.

So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.