In retrospect, it could be hilariously worth it to buy an ad spot and just play that “enjoy 30 minutes of ad free listening” blurb.

Counter point - the internet is full of people who will hit you with an opinion or criticism qualified by zero effort, evidence, or critical thinking, to the point you aren’t even sure if they’re a person or just a bot that throws out dumb “psychic reading” quality nonsense.

I think an appropriate response to this is to demonstrate that you’re allowing AI to answer their question, rather than involve your own cognitive time. It’s basically the same thing as letting your phone answer a suspicious call with a generic “please state your name and why you’re calling”. It doesn’t just save you time, it very deliberately declares a boundary that says “you can waste your time on this bot, but you’re not getting my time”.

Like I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember “let me google that for you”, but it’s basically that.

I mean, there’s a buffet of conspiracies around what happened to Epstein, but most would agree he was in jail for his crimes.

I feel like if we could build a device that absorbed the harmonic frequency of saying “Biden” on fox news, we could probably power the whole planet and part of Mars.

It’s worse than that. Much like the corporate, “middle class” white collar structure depends on keeping people too indebted to ever really have power or freedom to negotiate for fairness, the military also depends on underpaying and overworking its people. They have to provide that same level of inadequacy, and then, make not getting it even more unbearable.

When you start to look at the math, a lot of the previously incomprehensible decisions of the government start to make sense. Why is abortion illegal? Because given free choice, poor people stop reproducing at levels needed to maintain the slave wage labor when they can’t afford the basic necessities to raise a family. Or more specifically, women do… you can find a willing sperm donor, but the mom gets told by society don’t have a baby you can’t afford, and does exactly that. And then they trot out a whole “God doesn’t like this” moral argument, all while happily looking the other way when it’s clear a bunch of their leaders party fucked kids on an offshore island.

Well, we figured out how to maintain the Turing test line.

To be clear, autism doesn’t make someone an asshole, but autism makes it a lot more apparent when someone is an asshole. Which in the current climate,

Downvote me father for I have committed bad praxis.

People are still paying over 100k for a bitcoin. Which in my opinion, is equally absurd and doomed to fail. Like yea, if you bought one for 2 dollars and turned it into 100k you won investing and maybe established generational wealth. But the same could be said if you managed to catch the windfall of NFTs, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid to assign billions of dollars in value to a global game of guess the number.

This is the key thing many criminals fail to understand. The fact Miranda rights exist and the officer just had the balls to read them to you and still wants to engage, should be a red flag as to just how much of a disadvantage you are at in the impending battle of wits.

I’m just glad they got a power hungry, austistic lunatic in charge now, so everyone can see this is absolutely the end game, before this becomes normalized and people like me get called retarded for not wanting a car that can be remote deactivated.

Honestly, AI creating absolute dogpiles of low-effort resumes, making shit up all while being the trendy thing so HR recruiters not only can’t ban it but have to embrace it, is the best damn thing to happen since the pandemic briefly taught us most of us could do our jobs remotely. I’ve already observed several new hires come in, make a complete mess and sail off for their next opportunity … it’s definitely gumming up the corporate gears. It’s automating all the circle jerk bullshit, and I’m here for it.

I believe some of the rich assholes really do see birth rates as a sort of global crisis. Mostly because it poses a threat to their bottom line. Less workers = less labor to exploit, less consumers to buy their shit, pay subscriptions or blast with ads. And a demographic shift where the size of the older generation is greater than the younger generation massively screws up social security systems that depend on taxes from the young to pay the benefits for the old. And, more nefariously - because parents necessarily consume more and become more reliable workers: when you’re living paycheck to paycheck you can’t afford to quit, take unpaid leave, turn up overtime or go on strike. But perhaps too, some may be experiencing the existential crisis that there is a real, natural limit to the growth of the human race, that we are not god-destined to just expand forever and ever, but rather finite in our place in the cosmos.

Piracy is still alive and well, especially in the Pacific and around nations with less powerful naval defenses. It’s probably to push back against piracy, especially with much the rest of the world turning towards “me first” attitudes and an island nation’s heavy reliance on trade for prosperity. It may also be that the agreement to purchase an aircraft carrier might extend the willingness of other nations to continue helping to protect the trade routes: like it’s a show of good faith that they’re helping too and not putting all the burden on other countries.

Lol. They were trying their damndest to get me and my family to install that. I’m like… there’s a bit of a conflict of interest there. I can see some value in having location data of your family, who’s driving too fast, if someone’s in an accident. I will absolutely not be sharing that data with the company that earns money for its shareholders by outperforming the statistical likelihood of paying me money, by finding every way possible to not pay me money.

NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it’s because I don’t engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven’t really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.

But…

I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren’t the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.

But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.

Judging by the stock price decline that didn’t start last week, but rather has been ongoing for monthsyears, you’re spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It’s not just an acronym they made up, though it’s definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a “DEI” hire is their way of saying the person wasn’t qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I’m wondering if there’s maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don’t really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one’s arguing that game’s success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn’t handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it’s got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don’t know. Despite their popularity, I just don’t play that many shooters.

It’s fair to continue to consider them in competition with other store fronts. Don’t be fooled into thinking it will always be a great way to get cheap games, though. That brand, is EXACTLY what IGN paid for when they bought them: for the faith they built up in people like yourself, that they are and will always continue to be a trusted company. And part of the amortization of that purchase, is converting that belief into money, by enshittifying it. By taking advantage that they can make less valuable offers, raise prices, and fail to keep up with competitors innovations, on the backs of people remembering the good experiences they had with the company based on its original ownership.

Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn’t buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.