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’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!

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.

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.

Indeed, I’ve seen the porn.

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.

Happily my job is so shit and poorly paid that I don’t anticipate it ever being worth automating. Sometimes humans are just cheaper.

This used to be the case with glass bottles in England back in the 80s. Seemed to work well, certainly I and a lot of other kids used to return as many of those bottles as we could to supplement pocket money. These days all the bottles are plastic and there’s no returns policy.

Phrases are definitely more memorable than forcing people to use capitals, numbers, symbols, all that shit. But there are just so many passwords to remember.

A pretty early chatbot called Eliza simulated a non-directive psychotherapist. It kind of feels like they’ve improved hugely but not really changed much.

I’m cool with that. Maybe they can do tailgaters next.

I don’t know what you’re referencing, but me too.

We agreed?