Yeah, turned out I was actually more loyal to the app I was using than I was to the platform. Though I was also pretty good to the platform, I contributed and interacted daily and often spent money buying gold. I tend to take the attitude that if I’m getting a lot of use out of something I don’t mind spending a little to support it. That’s all in the past now and I wonder how many other paying users they burned.

AMA used to be a pretty big draw for lots of people who didn’t regularly use the site and often made international news, but they fucked that right up.

Yeah, this IPO will probably go just fine and a bunch of wankers will make a bunch of money. That’s what it’s all about, after all.

I’m one of those people who reads several books at once, swapping between them depending on my mood and engagement. Currently the great mortality by John Kerry, the salted earth by Jeff Somers, woken furies by Richard Morgan, a journal of the plague year by Daniel Defoe, velocity weapon by Megan O’Keefe, and a couple of others that I may not finish.

I’d probably try something similar if I could, I’m not in the US though.

I’m guessing it’ll do pretty well, at least initially. There’s got to be a whole lot of investors out there who just want to get in on the new big tech IPO and still jump in. I’m not convinced the WSB crew will really move the dial. Yeah it’d be an amusing and salutary lesson if the IPO shits the bed but I can’t see it happening. I’m no expert tho!

“I’m a criminal and now black people can relate to me!”

FFS

They’ve had investors who were willing to pay into a loss-making company. Could be that they sold investors on the idea that it will be profitable at some point in the future but it needs to be funded while it grows. Could also be that the value they see in it is not just financial - the ability to influence opinion, harvest data, stuff like that.

Why on earth would they give those sweet pre-IPO shares up to the unwashed masses if they thought there was even a remote chance the IPO would at least break even?

I suspect it’s because they’re worried that their users are going to short them and encourage others to do the same, so they’re trying to get them involved and committed. They don’t want WSB causing shit. My guess is that the share prices will do pretty well, at least initially. There are plenty of ignorant investors who want to get in on the next big tech stock. Just a guess though, I don’t know enough about this stuff to invest in stocks myself.

Yeah, my parents didn’t have money for expensive toys either. I had a small transformer that I swapped off a kid at school for all my marbles (including the large steel bearing). It transformed from robot into tape cassette and I thought that was just cool as fuck.

When I was a kid in the 70s, a lurker was a turd that had failed to flush away properly. As in : “Dad left a big beefy lurker in the toilet again.” How language changes.

Yeah, and you can’t use karma as a good metric for determining relevance or accuracy. I contributed ten years of mostly fairly good quality posts but my highest rated was a joke about gangbangs.

It’s to prevent a small child from falling arse-first into the crapper and causing a blockage.

Me neither. And now I can’t see how I missed it.

I’ll admit I was a bit taken in by the image his PR people created, a few years back before he decided he didn’t need them. I think I wanted to believe in the benevolent billionaire bullshit, that maybe a rich person wanted to do some good in the world. Dumb fuckin me, won’t be making that mistake again.

Oh well.

I mean, people paid to attend trump ‘university’. There are always plenty of fools who will buy stupid shit. I kind of feel sorry for the students though. Most people are pretty young at university age and many are still forming their perspectives. Getting away from home and meeting new people is an important part of this. Plenty of people from conservative families go away to uni and start to see that they’ve been brought up on bullshit. This is an attempt to stop that from happening - the ‘anti-woke’ shit will attract more conservative students which will reduce the chance that any of them will encounter different views and cultures so they stay in their ignorance bubble. Don’t want little Johnny or Jane coming home from school an anarchist! It’s sad for the students though who will come away in massive debt with a useless degree and have less opportunity for healthy change.

Rawnsley park is pretty sketchy at night but it’s not the most dodgy park in the area. There’s a lot of dealing goes on there, I’m assuming this stabbing is related.

now AI will be trained on your craziest “private” conversations

I have no idea what horrible thing this will do to an LLM but I’m kind of curious.

AI just lowers the barrier required for people to be able to express what’s in their mind

Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with people being about to express themselves, but that’s not necessarily art. With art the barriers are things like talent, creativity, and hard work. Lowering those barriers mostly creates rubbish. Typing ‘Make a pic of an x fighting a y and make it look cool!’ doesn’t make anyone an artist.