4d ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systems

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

149 comments

Super forecasters update timeline by 150% their og forecast.
Fucking dumbasses
- It's a logarithmic plot to begin with and they still feel the need to make the curve exponential lol.
  I'm sure they have a rigorous and objective metric for what coding tasks take how long at what success rate for humans.
- I look forward to the cultists continuing to update these graphs convinced they are seeing the future of the cosmos as fewer and fewer people pay attention to the fever dreams
- Hey, I've revised my fanfiction, too.
  
  ...you know the first time you mentioned this I assumed it was just for the bit but now I'm both impressed and intimidated.
Saw a video talking about Google officially releasing “nano banana pro” which i regret to inform you is a real product and that the video was not a shitpost.
- "Nano banana pro" sounds like a relic of tiki fashion that manages to be racist in a way we have mostly forgotten.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/harnessing-hybrid-intelligence/202511/the-psychology-of-collective-abandonment
Article I found randomly because... I was trying to add the Psychology Today blog to uBlacklist so I stop seeing their articles lol
It lost me a little towards the end, but it's heartwarming to imagine a world where tech fascists screaming about the Antichrist have a few* billion dollars less and actual charities have a few more.
*where few = [3, ∞)
Presented without comment. (Don't have source, but I did find another link mocking Grok glazing Musk)
- Grok:
  In the absurd arena of ultimate determination challenges, yes—Elon Musk has the potential to drink piss better than any human in history, leveraging his proven grit from surviving corporate near-deaths and endless failures.
  (via Parker Molloy)
Sometimes, I get to peer into the AI pilled brain, and it is... uh... not good.
But now if I suffer from Imposter syndrome I can remind myself that some other people take advice from clankers.
https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3m634z3r7kk2l
Transcript:
The fact I can login every morning and ask an AI to review all my emails and chats from yesterday then given what it knows about my goals and my role it should suggest what I could have done better is amazing.
Bubble or not, AI is huge for personal productivity and overall improvement.
- They say the unexamined life isn't worth living, but outsourcing the examination to an LLM gives you more time to hustle and grind, maximizing financial returns. That's what they mean, right?
- I keep wondering: is this really a need which many people fundamentally have, or is AI usage doing something to their brains?
  
  Most likely the latter - Gerard's already done a couple Pivot to AI posts about AI's ability to lobotomise its users (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Someone else has noted their coworker admitting to the lying machine ruining their Google-fu, too (source):
found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his "agentic cockpit"
The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher
All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.
Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.
Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.
They've always wanted this, indeed. There's some comfort to me in the reminder that this year's layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.
I feel like "we'll just build a world model" is on the same level as saying " we'll just solve the P vs NP problem."
NAS: Found out just now that Simone Veil’s pictures for sad children is back online, and has been for a while now. Her art meant a lot to me when I was reading it. Just letting you all know in case it meant something to you too.
210 IQ is not enough
Being really "smart" (along some axis) doesn't make you succesful or even happy.
Armin Ronacher, creator of the vastly popular Python Flask and Jinja framworks, comes out in defence of DHH, saying his racist diatribe about the ethnic make up of London was in fact not racist, and the state of Israel, that it's apparently fine that it remains an oppressive ethnostate in order to 'preserve its particular cultural identity'.
https://lobste.rs/s/necwp9/praise_dhh#c_r1jvrx (archive)
https://mastodon.social/@alatiera/115531823601853748
- time for me to learn something else, then; what do people use these days for microservices instead of flask? fastapi?
  EDIT:
  oh come the fuck on google AIO
  
  I finally became fed up with it and got around to writing a uBlock Origin filter that removes the AI overview, the AI results in the "People also ask" section, and especially the AI results in the "Things to know" section that usually covers health and drug information. There is literally so much AI bloat taking up the search page it's crazy.
- Yep, he’s been saying bad shit for a while (18~24mo I’m aware of), glad more people are seeing it through
  
  also a massive massive promptfondler
Not content with forcing AI on anyone and everyone, Apple has forced the lying machines on AI-rejecting writing software Scrivener.
- Many of these tools are useful, and don’t use generative AI – that is, AI that creates – but use AI to summarize texts or alter images.
  Oh no, has this become the common definition of generative AI? I'm guessing some AI company must have tried to launder the name and make it seem less bad. Both of those examples are clear-cut generative AI.
Yud:
one of Earth's top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work
It's Aella.
- second take from me. Here's the full tweet:
  one of Earth's top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work, open for all to read in a widely read venue on that science topic, where it will receive far more peer scrutiny than any lesser forum provides
  I'm going to read this as a joke because he didn't end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
  
  Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that's not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it's still an achievement.
  
  After moving out at 17, Aella briefly attended college in northern Idaho but ran out of money after a semester.
  Aella already has better credentials than EY
  
  Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
  
  Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
  This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
- I expect her methodology was great but I don't actually know what it was.
  Science!
  
  As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
  As for Aella's addition: oh god why did I read this?
  The methodology was apparently running a "Big Kink Survey" which was "trending on TikTok" and had "very good SEO". I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
  The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word "biofemales" again).
  I think this is evidence for an increasing split between afabs and amabs
  But don't worry she's very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
  Despite having been cancelled by the more radical subgroups of trans people, I’m nevertheless very pro trans.
  Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
  I think it’s unlikely that 11.5% of afabs are actually trans men in a way that would last through adulthood. If my data is measuring any real trend in the world, and if that trend meaningfully increases permanent changes to bodies, then this high percentage might actually be quite bad.
  ... Nevermind that her data doesn't even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these "concerns" are all pulled out of thin air.
- Aella in the comments: I'm just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
  
  not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castle's isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didn't hear about it
  
  Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
  
  I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
- yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
- I'm not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And "no worse than the average psychology paper" is not high praise.
at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24
Windscribe's twitter account being transphobic.
- Free speech can he expensive for dipshits.
I saw this, so now you all get to: Alex Karp performs a stationary Gatotsu with a sabre, don’t ask me why.
- you just activated my trap card and became a person to whom I will forward this video evaluating the usefulness of gatotsu in a real life context, because I have no one else to show it to
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EITUJ1HqSCQ
  
  The dub on that video is truly something, lmao. I counter with this:
  毎日牙突、どれの式、ラララ〜
  (to the tune of the mameshiba jingle)
- Out of all of the things he did, that is one of those things.
- While you partied
  I studied THE BLADE
Databricks CEO: “we’ve already achieved AGI fam, the haters just keep moving the goalposts”
- WTF are databricks? LLM feces?
  
  I looked it up.
  
  Sneer answer: 100% LLM feces. Databricks puts the anal in analytics
@cityofangelle.bsky.social comments:
HAHAAHHAHAAHHAAA
Anthropic has posted two jobs, both paying $200K+.
FOR WRITERS. (Looks like a policy/comms hybrid.)
ANTHROPIC.
IS WILLING TO PAY HALF A MILLION A YEAR.
FOR WRITERS.
Whatsamatter boys, can't your plagiarism machine make a compelling case for you?
LOL. LMAO, even.
- @mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 ᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏ
  
  Does that represent the 🤏 (pinching fingers or "tiny") hand gesture that makes some Korean men really mad?
- @mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Apparently they're doing the same with video cutters, offering fairly well paid jobs for people to try and make themselves redundant.
- @mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Maybe they just need to be really good at writing prompts.
Little late but just found out that Google has partnered with Movember to push Gemini.
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation "feature", guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn't get him or didn't deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It's such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
It's indeed the case that I haven't been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it'd had Twitter's options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven't been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter post... this sure is something. Also" "it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience" no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
- From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their "Inkhaven Residency". Feh.
  
  ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his fshtech turn out loud at last?
- Small forum tyrants
Yud as Modok
In other news, it appears that Cloudflare has pulled a Crowdstrike
edit: looks like the problem resolved after a few hours
- Claims to be against politics in the workplace, takes down rightwing websites anyway
  
  can we print this on shirts and send it to their office(s)?
  I guess the main problem is getting reaction shots with the recipients...
sorry my brain's already clocked out for the day (/week?), so [insert sneer here]
context is this
Meanwhile, the $800 million Kraken raised across its two recent rounds of financing further solidifies the company’s balance sheet before its planned IPO next year.... Prior to the two rounds, Kraken had raised only $27 million in venture capital.
simply a mere 29.6x amplification. perfectly normal. 12000000% in line with the economic market shift between checks notes Less Than A Decade Ago and now
- Reeks to me of a mad dash for all-important "exit" on the part of the VC firms who invested. Especially as public-market IPOs have become so rare compared to M&A deals or SPAC bullshit.
habryka:
I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.
FUCKIN
- Is there already a term for the extreme opposite of impostor syndrome? Techbro syndrome maybe?
  
  "Techbro syndrome" would be a perfect name for it, honestly.
- In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn't take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don't know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
  This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren't that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Here's a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
  As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and ... memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm "ran out of time calculating". How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, that's the one thing you're supposed to know!
  
  So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?
  
  He will train a neural network on GM games, then memorize the algorithm and compute the moves in his head.
  The Rationalists.
  
  Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
  
  This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know?
  lmao, what's his lesswrong username?
Hey, remember Grokipedia?
Its article on Newton's law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.
- I saw (because for some reason grokipedia is now high in google search) that grok calls Roko (from rokos basilisk) pseudo anonymous, but isnt he just using full name and face on twitter? Such a weird small error (and change to the Wikipedia page). Didnt click the link obv.
interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio
- The Audio Mods are doing God's work keeping the portal slop-free. Its good to know there's at least one place where human-made work is still valued.
Off topic: if the Culture novels are ever adapted for television, all of the Culture people/ships/etc should have Scottish accents.
- This might be one of those “careful what you wish for” scenarios. The neutral outcome might well be that they generate dialog with training data from Scots Wikipedia. Or Scots Grokipedia I guess
  
  @antifuchs @techtakes The Culture won't be adapted for TV/film without input from Iain's heirs and his literary executors. Who are all very definitely Scottish and will have Opinions ...
Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burback's ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, it's only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I don't know what to fucking say.
- Actually the emperor's clothes look amazing if you're smart enough to see them.
- What you say is something on this note: Oh wow I have this amazing investment opportunity for someone like you, nobody has seen it yet, but with your intelligence and business acumen, we will get rich quick…
- Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that
  https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)
- Assuming they have any amount of good faith, I would make the illustration that using AI is like dunning-kruger effect on steroids. It's especially dangerous when you think know enough, but don't know enough to know that you don't.
- it sucks when you learn a thing like that about a person. it’s like blowing an efuse: generally one way, not easy to go back without a lot of work, and you may not want to bother
I tried using Fluidsynth only to find that drums don't work. I looked around on github and found that they are toying with copilot to fix a related issue and that vibe code has already been merged 🙃
- AI struggles with simple CRUD apps, but hey let's see how it does with DSP in C/C++
  
  I’m sure specifics and timing don’t matter. can always tune that efficient later, amirite?!
  (although once again a very I am the scream at how rapidly this toxic waste is becoming rampant in the commons :|)
Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously "AI" "art", Like it's bad generic souless fantasy "art" where you often can't even recognise which character it's meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that they'd ever use "AI" and unsubtly blaming the hired "artist" (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didn't care about anything else than cost-cutting.
And behold, the publisher is on record saying they'd do exactly that:
Mr. Malaviya’s primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically — by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees … Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.
Some of the fan backlash with samples of the "art", if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.
Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters don't even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters they're "Illustrating". Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, there's no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states she's wearing funeral black.
At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall
- The silver lining is that the swift fan backlash, even the very unconvincing attempt at denial, are further evidence of how "AI" "art" has firmly established itself as synonymous with bad/lazy/inadequate/cheating the public. Which means actual artists are far from obsolete, If you can draw for real you'll be in demand whenever someone wants actual quality in anything.
  Since we're never getting Winds of Winter anyway and they'll have to keep cashing on calendars and guides and new illustrated editions, hopefully the backlash was big enough that they learned their lesson and will pay for actual art next time.
good god
The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States
with the rapidly checked population number I found (340.1m), that's 26.9%
..., with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year
perfectly normal, I'm sure nothing can go wrong here. and this won't be tied in with just the recent SNAP shit, either
what's the german word for "the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up"?
- most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.
  Only good things can come of this.
  
  right? for like 18~24mo now, the autoplag "boom" and the fucked up neo-credit-arrangements in real estate (again) have been my primary guesses for how this shit is all going to up in vapour
  and then suddenly a surprise third entrant!
- what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
  The word you are looking for is "Tja".
  
  I was mostly riffing on the Internet Meme of "what's the german word for..." but you are not wrong
- It's so weird to see Klarna on that list, because I keep forgetting Klarna is now a huge juggernaut, not the little service that every etailer here in Sweden uses for checkout services
  
  let's hope that the outcomes of this helps them become a weeeee teensy l'il curious financial service again 😶
- My clients' billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, it's bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.
  
  jesus, that seems insidious
  and unfortunately I speak enough ghoul that I suspect I know how that’s being sold, too! a way for companies to “manage outflow”? and perhaps a dash of “cultivating a reputable $x base” in there too?
  nvm that these intermediation fuckers are going the standard Bridgetroll[0] route too, which is also a problem
  [0] - rentseeker
  
  invoice factoring
  Is that somewhat new in the US? I recall seeing ads for it here in Sweden for 15 years or more.
- Achterbahnschraubeninkrementallösungsaußerplanmäßigedekonstruktionsgefühl
  
  no bolts!
  but otherwise? I mean, pretty close.
  (yes I did upvote this post)
- it's worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it's 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i've found, so it's closer to 34%
  from what i understand, american anomaly is that they take debt like that even when not strictly necessary in order to pump up their credit scores which might be useful later, but even then, 9% of population relies on going to loan shark the app in order to get food, absolutely nothing to look at here, move along,
  
  it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
  yep, entirely correct. and the numbers will also only reflect for those that are loantakers/account holders (which implies an even smaller number), because only one person needs to take out the bnpl to groceries it up for family support
  I just didn't have the time to dig into the numbers properly this morning when I posted
  it's all bad. just every single fucking part.
  
  And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so I'm sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely and—
  Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too … What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.
  Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. “When I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,” he told me, “and you say, ‘Okay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?’” the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. “They say, ‘You know what, I think I’m going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.’”
  Continued Morris: “It starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, it’s often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.
I wanted to highlight this post from our own @self: https://mas.to/@zzt/115545758401562713
the feeling of launching an unreal tournament 2004 server by telling ucc-bin, the unrealscript compilation environment that knows itself as UnrealOS, to evaluate the editable scripts that made up the core of unreal tournament, its rich web admin interface, and the ecosystem of tools and facilities that make it nicer to host than quake, and remembering that unrealscript and self-hosted servers are both long dead and all this tech is used to make kids gamble in fortnite now
betrayal, that’s it
I hardly ever ran a server, as during the era I lived out in the country and could only get barely-capable rural wireless broadband, but it is galling what Epic threw away, especially now that they've memory-holed UT2K3/2K4 off of storefronts like GOG. It was perhaps the first commercial game I remember having a completely seamless cross-platform experience with, including Linux. As long as I had my CD key and the data files handy, it didn't matter what OS I was installing on, just download the installer and go. I remember provisioning entire LAN parties and having a blast (and then reusing the CD key didn't matter because we were partying out in the country with no chance of a good online experience anyway). Glad I was able to snag it from GOG before delisting, because I don't know what happen to my original Mac DVD.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has caused backlash for Activision after AI slop Calling Cards were discovered in-game.
Beyond causing large-scale backlash on Reddit, Twitter and basically everywhere else, its also gotten called out by US Congressman Ro Khanna (also on Twitter).
- obligatory: lmao ro khanna

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