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.

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.

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.

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

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

We agreed?

I don’t know but maybe it’s short for ‘open goal’

Bank errors in your favour do happen, or at least they did - one happened to me maybe twenty five years ago. I was broke and went to the bank to pay in my last £30-something of cash to cover an outgoing bill. Stopped at the cash machine outside my bank to check my balance was sufficient now, and found that the cashier had put an extra 4 zeros on the figure I’d deposited. I was rich! I was also in my early 20s and not thinking too clearly I guess because my immediate response was to rush home to get my passport with the intention of going abroad and opening an account into which to transfer the funds, never coming back. I checked my balance again at another machine closer to home and the bank had already caught and corrected their mistake. Took them maybe thirty minutes.

After a bit of occurred to me that I was lucky really, because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing and the funds would have been traced very easily and I’d have been in deep shit.

But yeah, anecdotal, but shit like that did happen. I assume it’s more rare these days as fewer humans are involved in the system, and fewer people use cash.

Or fashion bow ties from their testicles. . ?

Yeah, this is why capitalism should be treated like a dangerous dog and kept on a short leash. It can kind of work out for a while when a government restrains it, ensures that legislation exists and is enforced to protect workers, the environment, and consumers. Strong unions are a good sign. This never seems to last though, because the governments get bought eventually.